Tycoons Row

Company Background

Digg is a platform that allows its users to create, distribute and rate editorial content. In effect, users on Digg can submit their categorized stories and have them ranked/de-ranked by the user community. It is one of the many user-generated content platforms that exist on the web today. Digg is in the Top 100 of websites and as a start-up now in the growth stage has amassed over $10 million in venture capital. The company was founded by Kevin Rose, (Site/Chief Architect) who also today is a producer on Revision 3 - a TV network for the web and Diggnation - which a weekly show that features the top digg.com stories. Jay Adelson is the CEO of the company, prior to Digg he was in the film and broadcasting industry. To start, Digg was developed with aprox. $2,000. On Digg, there are over 5,000 stories submitted daily.

Strategic Philosophy

The strategic philosophy at Digg today is to differentiate itself from other user-generated content sites through innovative features and giving the user community improved ways to track, gain awareness and share their content with other users and the world to see. A perfect example of this is that Digg has podcasts that are able to be digged, ranked and shared. Another feature is Digg Labs which gives you a real-time, interactive view of stories that are submitted.

Mission:

Digg aims to give the “editorial control back to the community.” Diggs mission is to allow people to create a customized experience and to create a great user-friendly experience allowing people to submit, read and rate content by creating social user communities.

Vision:

Digg’s vision is to dominate and expand in user-generated content and social networking platforms categories. They aim to not provide just technology news but to expand in other genres of news, for example politics and entertainment. This will be achieved by continually to enhance the existing products and provide users an easy way to view their Top stories and provide unique experiences.

Existing Competitors:

Top competitors that are also in this growth stage based on technology in the user-generated content vicinity are slashdot.org, delicious.com, Reddit, and up and comer, newsvine.com

Finance:

Some basic business objectives of the company are to become cash flow profitable. One way this can be done is to expand the revenue models from ads into additional forms. For example, the Stack & Swarm tools on Digg are extremely valuable information for corporations to use. The key in selling this would be to provide this service free to its community, however, as a product/service to large corporations. Currently, the company is not cash flow profitable, but reports say that they soon will be.

Operations:

Digg currently has 18 employees. I noticed that they are not currently hiring, however, as they grow their might be a need. The company also generates revenue from the Digg Store, which provides their brand name clothing, stickers and other swag. Some things that Digg does well are to continually enhance their existing site and user tools. This is a key to keep the audience engaged. Currently, Digg is on version 3.0 with the company. The advantage that they have currently is the way information is ranked, especially on the home page. Not only you can get the Top Diggs that are “newly popular,” but also the top stories ranked in 24 hrs, 7 days, 30 days, in the past year, top news, videos and podcasts, also ranked amongst categories. So, the competitive advantage is that a user can definitely narrow down a specific market segment and see how their content has done on a specific period of time. Also, they were an early entrant into this tech market as they began in 2004.

I think Digg is a great tool to spread and share user-generated content. As of Dec. 2006, Digg gets over 10 million unique visitors and over 200 million pages views, according to an interview with Digg execs at TechCrunch. The services and products Digg will be providing will definitely provide value in the future. Look out for great things with this company.