Digg: Sailing Toward Scylla & Charybdas?

In March 2010 at a massive South by Southwest event, then CEO of Digg, Jay Adelson, announced a major overhaul to the popular social news website.

However, before the “soon to be released” overhaul came to fruition, Adelson stepped down from his leadership role at the company per an April 4th, 2010 post on the company blog.

At that point the speculation was rampant with claims ranging from “simple differences of opinion” to “trouble brewing” at the company and more specifically with the much anticipated Digg Version 4.  However, Digg founder Kevin Rose has not veered from statements made to TechCrunch over a year ago in that the new Digg will be more real time and provide a more personalized experience.

Instead of piling onto the gross speculation or blindly attacking Rose’s direction, I decided to take a look at some data.  What I found is surprising in that the real problem Digg could need to solve for is better integration with non-social media users who still use the “Forward” feature in their email client to circulate viral content.   If this is true, Digg Version 4, described by Kevin Rose himself as a “ballsy move”, could be steering the social news site to the waters between the 6-headed mythical monster Scylla and the inescapable whirlpool Charybdas.

Removing the mythological terms, Scylla and Charybdas are none other than Facebook and Twitter. Ironically, another beast could be a much easier one to tame.

About Digg and The Challenges

Per the About page on Digg:

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.

How do we do this? Everything on Digg — from news to videos to images — is submitted by our community (that would be you). Once something is submitted, other people see it and Digg what they like best. If your submission rocks and receives enough Diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of our visitors to see.

The beauty about Digg is that there are no editors, and between the users and aggressive technology controls the site maximizes quality content and minimizes SPAM submissions.  Though they have 40 million unique views per month, the downside is that they only have around 5 million registered users and the site is really driven by a few thousand power Digg users.

According to founder Kevin Rose, only about 140 submissions reach the front page each day.  For better or worse, the site really only has three main activities:  1) submitting content, 2) digging or burying content (thumbs up/thumbs down style voting), and 3) commenting.

Still for the millions of users and non-users alike who visit the site, of which NYC Mayor Bloomberg is one, Digg produces a very clean presentation of news, images, and videos of interest.  The problem facing Rose is that Digg lacks the real-time power of other social media websites like Twitter and the newsfeed feature inside of Facebook.  Moreover, Facebook has recently added a Digg-like feature called “Facebook Like” that when combined with a personalized experience and Facebok’s over 700 million engaged users could present a real threat to the future of Digg.

The Realities of Facebook and Twitter with Respect to Digg

Without going into a long dissertation, I’ll net out the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter and Facebook in a few sentences.

Twitter has set the standard in terms of real-time information.  The passing of Michael Jackson, which broke on TMZ and dominated Twitter more than 4 hours before it appeared on Google’s news feed, proved to the world how quickly information can travel through social media.  Twitter, on the other hand, quite possibly has the worst user interface and overall usability of just about any online destination.  Usage of the site requires third party tools, a knowledge of “CB handle” type terminology, and an understanding of who to follow in order to get the right experience.

Facebook has been an unprecedented online phenomenon.  It has many parallels to Las Vegas in that some come for the shows, others for the food, nightlife, conventions, gambling, and more.  Regardless of why you come to Facebook, you generally are connected with people whom you personally know and met.  The numbers are staggering in that 50% of the 400 million active users visit the site on a daily basis and the average user has over 130 friend connections.  With the introduction of the Facebook Like feature, the mammoth social media site has actually entered Digg territory.  On the downside, I’ll let How-To-Blog.TV author Jerod Morris’ post on Midwest Sports Fans tell the story of why Facebook sucks.  Despite any weaknesses, Facebook and Twitter have won the popularity contest.

“You don’t hear much about Digg these days,” commented Mike D. Merrill, President of Social Media Club Dallas.  ”Facebook and Twitter have taken the headlines.”

Furthermore, if I can get fast and accurate news via Twitter, and a true sense of popularity from people I’ve actually shaken hands with on Facebook, where does this leave the need for Digg?

I think Digg founder Kevin Rose was alluding to this exact question as he revealed directions for Digg V4 in a TechCrunch video interview over 1 year ago.  Before we rush to conclusions, let’s look at some data.

Social Media: Dissecting Viral Content

On May 10th, 2010, a sports-related picture was posted on PicChore.com called “Best Fan Sign” and was thereafter submitted to a host of social media sites.  The sites where it was shared included Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and StumbleUpon.  Having achieved 1977 Facebook shares, 210 retweets, 1517 stumbles, and 3,262 diggs, this post qualifies for viral status online.  Here are the raw data facts:

• The post had 146,000 page views in a 10-hour period of time and 178,595 visitors from 404 sources in a 3 day period.
• Being a photo, the average time on site was only 6 seconds and the bounce rate was 96.83%.
• The average number of pages per visitor was 1.05, which coincides with such a high bounce rate.

Here is where the data for that 3 day period gets interesting as it relates to the different traffic sources.

• The #1 referring source of visitors was Digg, delivering over 125,000.
• Facebook only delivered 1,420 visitors and Twitter a measly 160 visitors.
• The #2 source of traffic was direct traffic delivering 27,502 visitors (more to come on this in a second).
• The Hot Clicks blog from SI.com delivered 15,027 visitors.
• The highest pages per visit and time on site datapoints came from Facebook referrals at 1.14 pages and 15 seconds respectively.
• The second highest pages per visit and referrals came from the direct visitors.
• Twitter visitors spent an average of 3 seconds on the site, which was among the worst.
• Digg visitors were about average, having visited 1.04 pages per visit during the average 6 seconds they were on the site.

Over the next 10 days:

• Digg produced an additional 29,408 visitors with 1.11 pages visited and an average of 8 seconds on site.
• Facebook and Twitter fell completely off the radar screen.
• Direct visitors accounted for another 8,297 visitors with 1.20 pages per visit and an average of 16 seconds on site.
• The post became the #4 hit in Google for the keywords “best fan signs” and created a suggestive search entry.

Here is the kicker: this site was a brand new site and the posting of the picture that went viral was not really supposed to have gotten out…but it did.

I personally didn’t decide to share it and Digg it until it was too late.  Thus, the only explanation for the direct visits was email sharing of the link!  This is further confirmed by the fact that beyond a handful of other social media sites in the referral list, the majority of the other 404 referring sources were email clients.

Since this happened during the work day and the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook still is the defacto standard email client, I’m confident that the direct visitors were shares of the link via email.   This leaves me to ask if email sharing is still that common in blogs with an established readership?  For that answer I reached out to John Poozadzides, founder of the popular One Man’s Blog and CEO of web analytics company, Woopra.

“We find less than 1% of referrals across all of our web analytics customers come from email,” said Pozadzides.  ”Any email readers of One Man’s Blog get their content from a Feedburner subscription which is technically Web 2.0.”

Before I draw any conclusions on Digg’s future, let’s talk about the quality of Digg visitors.

The Quality of Digg Visitors

Though the data for different sources of content and the context under which the content is shared will vary, pictures have been shared on the Internet on a regular basis over the past decade and are a pretty good indicator of the impact of various forms of social media.  Still, I reached out to Jerod Morris and asked him what statistical trends he saw on MidwestSportsFans.Com for more serious editorial that had gotten similar traction through social media.

Time on page from our direct visitors and Digg referrals is approximately 3 times that of Twitter, Facebook, and Google referrals.  Whether passive or active, Digg users take content serious that has been voted popular, said Jerod Morris, Editor of MidwestSportsFans.Com .

I have further seen evidence of Twitter traffic being less impressive.  When social media  power house Chris Brogan tweeted about a post on How-To-Blog.TV, we saw a huge 1 hour traffic spike but very little to brag about in terms of time on site.

Though Facebook has the sheer user numbers in its favor, people do not like to leave the comfortable confines of the Facebook website. Even features like image previews and on-page commentary do not encourage visitors to other sites on the web.  Furthermore, as Facebook has implemented the real time feature of its news feed, I feel that content on the site has lost its stickiness and has become more of a quick flash to the eyes of users.

If Digg users are more engaged and produce stickier traffic, which has to be more attractive to advertisers, is a platform overhaul what Digg really needs?  In doing so, is Kevin Rose steering the site into treacherous waters?  Or could a simple brand revitalization take place without the drastic change?

The Problem Space

In Rose’s interview with TechCrunch, he admits that previous advances at Digg have netted out activity and traffic increases ranging from 5% to 20%.  Still, he’d like to see the number of viral content on his website go from the 5-15K range to the 20-30K range in terms of the number of diggs.  He also concedes that other social bookmarking sites like Mixx and Propeller aren’t the competition (hence my Twitter/Facebook hypothesis).

Still, I think Digg has to look within for the problem.  The site has always been accused of being an insider’s site.  At the risk of sounding old fashioned, I’m going to argue that Digg should connect with new and old users alike in a much more simplistic way.  The first would be a refreshed PR campaign that highlights the site’s strengths.  Second, focus on a new user on-boarding process more geared to help them to succeed.  Last, improve upon usability knowing that non-users are defaulting to email sharing instead of site interaction.  Mabye instead of steering the Digg boat between Scylla and Charybdas, Digg should just modify its current course.

Kevin Rose’s Big Gamble

The Digg community is nervous.  With the departure of Jay Adelson and massive changes coming our way, I predict one of three things will happen:

• Kevin’s brillance will shine through again and the new Digg will escalate the site and the community on all fronts.
• Kevin’s action on a perceived “third down and long yardage” situation will not hit its mark, causing disruption for the community.  Mike Phillips’ blog post, “Digg is Dead” has a great perspective on this..
• Digg will show the improved “friending” and community card to the general public while continuing to be driven by power users and Google-like algorithms that take a lot more than popularity into consideration.

Though I was sad to see Jay depart from the Digg family, and I am one who is always made nervous by massive overhauls, I wish Rose the best of luck and hope that Digg does achieve new highs for its users and visitors.  Still, I am going to be a bit pessimistic and predict that Digg Version 4′s efforts to create a more real time and personalized experience will alienate committed Digg users and dilute the quality of content the community deems popular.  Digg’s front page is the true asset of the community.  It will need to continue to be front and center in order to avoid the dilution that both Twitter and Facebook see with their emphasis on real time content.   I’d love to hear from other Digg users as to what you think?

For now, I’ll leave you with a version 4 preview that was posted on Mashable:

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Derick Schaefer is the founder and Managing Director of Orangecast Social Media based in Dallas, TX and has been a passive Digg.Com user since 2007 and an active user since 2009.  He is a regular contributor to How-To-Blog.TV.  Prior to founding Orangecast, Derick spent 10 years in a variety of roles with the Microsoft Corporation.

(photo derived from James Gillray 1793 cartoon entitled ‘Britannia Caught Between Scylla and Charybdas’)