Digg Reboots Again ⇥ torment-nexus.mathewingram.com
Samantha Subin, CNBC:
Content aggregator Digg is making a comeback with the help of an unlikely partner: Reddit co-founder and rival Alexis Ohanian.
Ohanian and Digg founder Kevin Rose acquired the platform for an undisclosed sum. The deal is backed by venture capital firms True Ventures, where Rose is a partner, and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The partnership was announced Wednesday in a video post to the company’s X account in which Rose called the partnership a “team-up he would have never imagined 20 years ago.”
Before it was acquired by Money Group, a publisher and advertising company, Digg was previously owned by BuySellAds. No word on how many people were working on the most recent version and whether any of them will continue.
What I find the most interesting about the Digg 2.0 announcement is something that wasn’t really teased out in any of the coverage I saw, and that is how it represents an attempt by Ohanian to go into competition with Reddit and his former partner Huffman, who took over running the company in 2014 (Ohanian left the board in 2009) and last year took it public with a $9.5-billion IPO. Although the IPO makes it sound like the last few years have been a raging success, Huffman’s tenure at Reddit has been marked by significant controversy, including changes that led to a revolt by some of the platform’s volunteer sub-Reddit moderators — the workforce that is more or less responsible for most of the company’s value. What Ohanian thinks of all this is unknown, because he has kept his thoughts about Reddit private, but the relaunch of Digg suggests he sees an opportunity there, a market niche that could potentially be filled.
I am considerably less optimistic than Ingram. Digg has been relaunched a few times — first as a curated link aggregator, then as a web magazine, with a detour for building a Google Reader-like RSS client. Under BuySellAds, it appeared to fill a Buzzfeed-like best-of-the-web role.
Digg is a valuable domain being passed around to find a sustainable business model.