Digg now has one million registered users, which is an impressive achievement. It’s also become the leading destination to vote on the news as well as a lightning rod for criticism, which is par for the course when you’re top dog. The key question, however, continues to be whether Digg is just a cool, useful service or a business. You figure that monetizing one million users wouldn’t be too difficult of a challenge but it’s difficult to currently see how Digg is making money because there are few ads on the site other than AdSense. I guess if you have enough volume, you can have a nice business based on AdSense but you’re not going to build a really business if you’re depending on getting a few cents from Google every time someone clicks on an AdSense ad. So what’s the business plan, Kevin Rose, beyond AdSense. Is there one?
Update: For more thoughts, check out Mathew Ingram, who wonders how much bigger Digg can get, and Andy Beale, who wonders how many duplicate, inactive or suspended accounts are being counted by Digg.
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3 Comments
Meh, a million users. Stumble Upon has nearly 2 million, and has been around much longer: http://tinyurl.com/2zel4t. Mind you, I don’t know if SU is a viable business, either.
Thanks for the link back to Marketing Pilgrim.
One note: Andy’s out of town this week, so please don’t blame my ramblings on him!
Also, in response to the first comment, I much prefer SU. SU does run a paid inclusion program (I just wrote about it here: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2007/03/should-you-use-paid-inclusion-for-stumbleupon.html ), so it has at least some income.
I have at least 2 dozen digg accounts, so they are not at a million yet.
j/k