November 6, 2023 • 43 mins
What has Digg been up to since our last episode about the site back in 2017? From shutting down a popular tool to another acquisition from a small ad company, we explore what has been up over at Digg.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So, just last Friday, we published a
tech Stuff classic episode called the Dig Story, and I
(00:28):
was thinking, I should probably do a very quick update
on what's been going on with Dig since twenty seventeen,
except you know me, I don't do quick updates because
I'm a chatty Cathy. So we're gonna do that. We're
gonna do an update on what's been happening with Dig
since twenty seventeen. But first I want to go back
and talk over kind of what happened with Dig in
(00:50):
the first place, just in case you didn't listen to
the original episode or the classic that published on Friday,
so that you're not totally in the dark. So Dig
originally law lunched in late two thousand and four, and
it was essentially a news aggregator site. Dig started off
as a site where users, the visitors, the members of
DIG would be able to share links to stuff that
(01:12):
they thought was useful or cool or entertaining or you
know whatever, and It was a site that was all
about discovery and sharing discovery. So search engines are great, right, Like,
if you are looking for something specific, then you can
go to a search engine and you can find a
link to something that answers your specific question. That's fantastic.
(01:35):
But what if you're just in the mood to you know,
browse and to see what's going on specifically, like what's
what's more important right now today? What is happening? What
if you didn't really know what you wanted to see
or read, you just knew that you wanted something, Then
a site like dig or Reddit, which launched not long
(01:56):
after Dig did and was Dig's big competitor, a site
like that could be a huge help. So Dig really
focused on the recent and the timely. They really were
hyper focused on things like tech and gaming and sports
and news, that kind of stuff like that was really
where they were focusing. Sharing a link on Dig then
(02:19):
gave the entire community the opportunity to weigh in on
whether they thought that particular story was important or not.
So if folks thought it was interesting or important and
they had a Dig account, they could boost the story
up the page ranking. This was called digging, an article,
(02:40):
and if an article received enough digs, it would get
promoted to the front page of Dig, which in turn
was being called the front page of the Internet. If
the community thought the story was lame or that, you know,
maybe it was already represented within Dig, whatever that might be,
you could vote it down. This was called burying an article.
(03:02):
The philosophy behind Dig was that the community determined what
stuff on the Internet was actually worth looking at. It
was giving power to the people. Now, none of that
would matter unless people actually used Dig. If it had
never attracted users, then it just would have been a
curiosity and nothing more. But it actually did attract quite
(03:23):
a few users. People began to flock to the site
and use it a lot, so their participation would ultimately
end up having a larger impact on the web in general.
Because if you had a piece that showed up on
Dig's front page, that could mean a significant boost traffic
as people checked out, you know, they click on the
article and go to your site. So Dig could end
(03:44):
up being really influential. There was this thing called the
Dig effect that was a big deal when Dig was,
you know, in its heyday, but just a couple of
years after launching the site, one of the co founders,
Kevin Rose, who was a personality really at that time.
He was on tech TV and had a show, a
(04:06):
podcast that he launched called Dignation The Pretty Famous Dude.
He started to encounter a frustrating experience because there were
some companies that were interested in purchasing Dig, and Rose
was like, yeah, I don't mind the idea of selling
it because he really liked creating stuff and getting it going.
(04:27):
But he was less interested in just sticking around forever. Right,
He liked the creative process. But he couldn't just sell
Dig and then move on to something else because Dig
had a board of directors who ultimately had the authority
of that decision about whether or not to sell a company,
and the board was convinced that the incoming offers, such
(04:51):
as one from news Corp. News Corps, which had famously
purchased MySpace, just undervalued the company. So news Corp's offer
was said to be somewhere around sixty million dollars, but
the board director said, no, that's way too low. We
need to have a much higher offer before we will
consider selling. So Rose couldn't sell to news Corp. He
(05:13):
just had to sort of sit back and continue working
on the site. Reportedly, he became less interested in doing
that over his time at DIG, so he thought it
would have been better to cash out and created a
new project, but he was beholden to the board. By
two thousand and eight, there was a much larger deal
that was in the works between Dig and Google. Now,
(05:35):
the rumor was that Google offered to acquire Dig for
the princely sum of two hundred million dollars, so it
looked like maybe the Bard directors had been right right,
like they had said sixty millions too low, and then
a couple of years later the offer's two hundred million. However,
(05:56):
that deal never actually happened. Negotiations fell apart for one
reason or another, perhaps a whole bunch of different reasons,
and Google did not go through with the deal. In
twenty ten, Dig tackled an ambitious and drastic redesign known
as DIG Version four. Reportedly, Kevin Rose made a huge
(06:16):
number of changes as part of a venture capital funding round,
and upon launch, this rollout was a disaster. The redesign
went from the very foundation of how Dig worked, like
even the actual technology that powered everything was changed, and
(06:37):
the changes went all the way through to user interface
and experience, and it turned out that not only did
it get rid of a lot of stuff that DIG
users valued, it was not ready for deployment when it
went live because people started to encounter frustrating glitches while
interacting with the new design. The whole website would crash
(06:57):
repeatedly throughout the day when the site was working, which
was never a guarantee. Users were very upset to see
historic features just missing from the experience, so, for example,
the option to bury a post was gone. Perhaps more
upsetting was the fact that this new version of dig
(07:17):
would allow news sites to automatically submit articles to DIG,
so instead of everything being user generated and user submitted,
now the news agencies could actually submit stuff themselves directly
to dig. It no longer was in the community's hands.
There was also a lot of complaints, although I never
found like any real strong corroborating evidence, but there were
(07:42):
a lot of complaints that some power users at DIG
had a disproportionate amount of control of what could be
seen and what would not make it to the front page,
and that meant the community as a whole found itself
unable to really get stuff seen on the main page,
so it was very disheartening. Alexis Ohanian, one of the
(08:03):
co founders of Reddit, you know, the big competitor to Dig,
actually published an open letter to Kevin Rose saying that
the new features in version four suggested that the team
had allowed investors to really weigh in on what should
and should not be part of the platform, and that
rather than listening to the community and responding to what
the community wanted, the site was listening to the money,
(08:25):
and that that in turn was alienating Dig's users. And
it turns out that, you know, a lot of what
he was saying was right, because a ton of Dig
users abandoned Dig. Many of them actually migrated on over
to Reddit. But that's another story, because Reddit itself has
had its own ups and downs, including a very tumultuous
(08:47):
twenty twenty three. Anyway, the various co founders of Dig
started to leave the company over time. By twenty eleven,
Kevin Rose was bouncing from the company as well. Lots
of users had Traffic was dr being precipitously. It was bad. Meanwhile,
social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were also growing rapidly
(09:08):
and taking over some of the functions that Dig had
performed because now folks could create a profile on a
system that prioritized communities and networks, at least that's what
they claimed to do. Then they could share stuff with
their friends on these platforms, So it was social first
(09:28):
and then content second. Kind of approach you could argue
Dig was maybe you know, content and social together, or
maybe even content first, social second. But the point is
Dig was seeing other sites drink its milkshake. On top
of all that, other companies were poaching talent from Dig.
(09:49):
The Washington Post company hired more than a dozen of
digs site engineers, for example, so it was pretty clear
Dig was on borrow time. In twenty twelve, Dig would
kind of of get sold for parts. Different parts of
Dig were sold off to other companies, but the site
itself and the underlying tech and the ip of what
(10:10):
made dig dig ended up going to a company called
Beta Works, and the price tag had dropped from that
theoretical high of two hundred million dollars with Google to
a much less grandiose half million. Don't get me wrong,
half a million dollars is a lot of money, It
just doesn't measure up to some of the earlier offers.
(10:32):
DIG had turned away in its history. I should also
add there's some dispute about that five hundred thousand dollars
sales price. That's what everyone reported, just about everyone anyway,
but tech crunches Frederick Lardinois reported that the actual deal
was considerably larger and included not just cash but also
(10:53):
equity in the company, and so the value was much
higher than what reports had suggested. In that same article,
he pointed out that Dig's annual ad revenue was likely
more than half a million dollars a year, so it
wouldn't really make sense to sell the company for half
a million dollars. But then again, Vox dot com reported
(11:14):
that Dig ran its entire service off of servers that
were on premises. You know, it wasn't a cloud based
company at that point, so it was really before cloud
competing had made it less expensive to run huge websites. Like,
if your website had a fairly modest user base, then
you probably wouldn't be seeing enormous bills per month. But
(11:36):
for Dig, because of how popular it was, Vox estimated
that it would cost a quarter million dollars a month
just to keep the site running. So then you're like, well,
even if your your revenue is more than half a
million dollars, If your monthly costs are two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, you're in trouble unless you're making significantly
(11:57):
more than half a million dollars a year. But whatever
the scope of the deal, however much it ended up
being under Beta Works, DIG would relaunch in the summer
of twenty twelve with an entirely different approach to content.
So instead of having users determine what material would make
up the front page, DIG featured an editorially curated front page. So,
(12:19):
in other words, DIG determined what went on Dig, not
users that were still like scoring systems in place and
that kind of stuff, but the fundamental operation of DIG
had totally transformed. Now that's pretty much where I left
off in that twenty seventeen episode. At that time, DIG
was still under the ownership of Beta Works, the company.
(12:41):
Beta Works typically focuses on startups that are at the
earliest stages of development. So Beta Works looks out for
interesting projects and then provides what's called seed stage funding,
which is the initial money that a startup needs in
order to kind of coalesce from an idea into something real.
Seed money helped startups do things like attract the right
(13:03):
talent and put together the earliest plans for how the
company will actually operate. To take over Dig was a
little bit outside the wheelhouse for that kind of company, though,
as I understand it, Beta Works mary Dig with a
socially driven news web app it had in development called
news dot Me. One thing Beta Works did have under
(13:23):
its belt was the service bit dot l y, the
URL shortener. That's another episode. It also helped develop tweet Deck,
which Twitter would ultimately purchase, but again that's a matter
for another episode. The heyday of Dig was over at
this point, and finding news articles and stuff from the
Beta Works era of Dig isn't that easy because people
(13:45):
had moved on. Reddit absorbed a ton of digs community,
and the new Dig was largely viewed as just another
web based news site. So really, in that stretch between
twenty twelve and two eighteen, there aren't that many news
items about Dig. But then things would change. I'll explain
(14:07):
more after we take this quick break. Okay, So, like
I said before the break, between twenty twelve and twenty eighteen,
you didn't see that many news stories about Dig. It
(14:28):
just seemed to be performing like a basic web page
that had news items on it, most of which were
either written by an internal editorial team or were connecting
to external news sources. So the next big bit of
Dig's history that I have to share happened. In early
(14:49):
spring twenty eighteen, Dig announced that it was shutting down
it's OURSS reader tool. So for those of y'all who
are not familiar with RSS, it stayed for really Simple Syndication,
or maybe it stands for RDF Site Summary. RDF in
turn stands for Resource Description Framework. There's actually disagreement on
(15:12):
what RSS stands for, but really the initialism doesn't matter.
RSS allows for the distribution of web updates or Internet
content in general to lots of other stuff. So what
does that actually mean? Well, let's take an example with podcasts.
How does your podcast app, whichever one you use, how
(15:35):
does it know when there is a new episode of
the shows that you subscribe to. Well, podcasts published to
a platform, and each podcast has an RSS feed associated
with it, your podcatching service checks for updates to the
various RSS feeds out there all the shows that you
subscribe to. So let's say that you subscribe to tech stuff,
(15:58):
it does a check to see is there a new
tech stuff episode? If there has not been an update
since the last time it did this check, nothing changes you,
no notifications, nothing like that. If when it checks the
RSS link and it finds an update, finds out there's
been a new episode added to the feed, your podcasting
(16:20):
app will say, Hey, there's a brand new episode of
that show you like, so you can listen to it
whenever you like. RSS tech led to the development of
RSS readers, So these tools let you subscribe to various
sources and you can view updates to those websites within
the reader itself. So instead of physically navigating to like
(16:44):
a dozen different websites that you like in order to
just see if anything's new. Let's say that you know
you typically visit four different news sites, a couple of
gaming sites. Maybe you visit I don't know, let's say
it's a financial site and you do all these and
those are typically the ones you go to. Instead of
(17:06):
going to each of those individually and looking to see
if there are any updates, you could use an RSS
reader that would just list out in chronological order reverse
chronological order, typically what the latest headlines are from the
various sources, and they would usually let you organize these
in various ways, so you could put all of your
sports relaid stuff in one place, you know, all of
(17:27):
your gaming stuff in another place, et cetera, and you
could just go through and look for headlines that caught
your interest. And you don't have to go to each
website individually just to see what the updates are. You
consolidate everything into a single view. It's incredibly useful. But
by twenty eighteen, the glory of the RSS reader days
was well in the past. A lot of companies that
(17:49):
had previously offered RSS readers had since shut them down.
For instance, Google shut down Google Reader way back in
twenty thirty. There are still folks out there today, a
decade later who are sore about that. I'm one of them. Honestly,
RSS readers really made it useful to get a quick
(18:12):
look at news, and there still are some out there.
I don't want to say that they don't exist anymore,
but some of the biggest ones have long since gone away. Anyway,
Dig had maintained its own RSS reader tool, and it
was fittingly enough called dig Reader, but in March twenty eighteen,
Dig announced that the feature would end on March twenty sixth.
(18:36):
Molly Mchughotharinger dot com posted a full article about this
and lamented the fact that it was the latest in
a long string of setbacks for people who just wanted
to be able to view web updates chronologically or reverse chronologically.
MCEU pointed out that a lot of platforms were leaning
harder and harder on algorithms to determine what a user
(18:59):
would actually see, and that these algorithms valued engagement and
sharing over quality. This internment, we were getting a lot
more junk, fake stuff, and misinformation put in front of us,
things that would grab our attention but not necessarily reflect reality.
That probably sounds familiar, right because we we've been talking
(19:23):
about that for a couple of years a lot, But
this was way back in twenty eighteen. It just hasn't
gotten any better. MCEW expressed sadness that yet another RSS
reader was going the way of the DODO, because it
marked another example of how it was growing increasingly hard
for an individual to curate their own web experience. Instead,
(19:47):
the various platforms out there, particularly social networks, were taking
over that task for us and dictating to us what
we would see as opposed to letting us say, Hey,
I'm really just interested in reading information from these sources
because I feel those sources are really reliable, so I
(20:07):
just want to see those Those options were going away anyway.
Just one month later after they shut down dig Reader,
even bigger news came out of dig. Beta Works sold
off a majority steak in DIG to another company called
buy sell Ads. It would not be a total acquisition.
(20:30):
Beta Works CEO John Borthwick indicated that Dig's previous shareholders,
including Beta Works itself, would retain some steak in DIG.
The actual details of the deal remained private. So to
this day, I have no clue how much buy sell
Ads spent in order to get a majority steak. I
(20:52):
don't even know what level that majority steak is, right,
I don't know what percentage of dig i sell ads owns,
but what the heck is buy sell Ads. That all
started with a guy named Todd Garland. He got his
start as a web designer, and he found that the
(21:14):
part he liked the least about creating web pages or
administering web pages was the whole process of securing ads
for web pages to help generate revenue. He found that
entire process to be slow and frustrating and overly complicated,
and he thought, what if you could build some software
(21:38):
to automate as much of that process as you possibly can,
to make it faster and simpler for the end users.
What if you could remove all those hurdles that typically
exist and through software, just make it a much less
painful experience. To that end, he built buy sell ads
(21:59):
so that from say a web page standpoint, a publisher standpoint,
a web admin wouldn't have to do anything other than
perhaps set a rate, you know, say like, all right,
this is how much I will charge an advertiser to
make use of the real estate on my web page.
And then that person would just wait to see which
(22:21):
ad requests get sent to them through this service and
then approve or deny from there, and that would get
things going. On the advertiser side. All they had to
do was determine if the ad rate made sense, Like
if they said, well, does it make sense for us
to pay this much? Are we going to get enough
traffic for that to be a good investment? And if so,
(22:44):
then they could say, all right, well we will. We're
interested in including this particular publisher as part of our
ad campaign, and that would be it. At least that
was the idea. I'll come back to buy sell ads
because the reputation of that company is a little up
(23:05):
in the air as far as I can tell, although
from extremely limited information, so keep all that in mind.
At any rate, Buy sell ads seemed like it was
an odd fit to purchase a majority share in an
online media company, But then you could also argue that
Beta Works was a weird fit, and Beta Works had
(23:27):
done it way back in twenty twelve. However, when you
really start to think about it, I argue the buy
sell ads acquisition makes a little more sense because an
ad company does serve two sets of customers. Right. You've
got your advertisers, who want to get ads in front
of people, preferably people who are more likely going to
(23:48):
act on the ad than otherwise. And then you've got
your publishers, the people who have real estate to offer
that they want to monetize on their sites or to
generate revenue. A company like buy sell ads has to
satisfy both groups, right. They have to satisfy both the
advertisers and the publishers, and by gaining majority ownership of
(24:11):
a publisher, because that's what dig is at this point.
It's a publisher. It's not an aggregator anymore, not really. Well,
that means that buy sell ads now has a platform
where it can actively test out new strategies. It can
deploy new approaches to matching ads to content. It can
look and see which of these are working well and
(24:33):
which ones don't like, which ones are generating more click
through which ones are not, and using that as like
a testing ground, it can then perhaps deploy strategies across
larger groups of customers. In addition to that, it also
this is something that Todd Garland has actually said, Buy
(24:54):
sell ads can try and design a publication platform strategy
that in theory maximizes the publisher's ability to monetize their site.
And then once they have figured out that strategy, they
can then license that to other publishers. So, in other words,
they come up with a process that other publishers can follow,
(25:18):
and by paying buy sell ads, they'll say, here's how
you do it, and just work with us, and we'll
make sure that we match you with advertisers that are
going to make the best use of your platform, and
everyone's happy. The advertisers get their ads acted on by
a larger audience, you get a bigger payout because of
the ad revenue coming in, and we all get rich. However,
(25:41):
buy sell ads. Purchasing dig made some folks feel anxious
is probably too big a word, because at this point
dig it really wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't
really in the mind share of your average netizin if
I am to use outdated terminology. So that being said,
(26:02):
people were still thinking, well, it might not be a
great relationship for an ad company to purchase a media company.
That almost seems like a conflict of interests right. You
can definitely see how an ad company might change the
media company so that it just is a vehicle for
delivering ads, similar to how the algorithm really just wants
(26:25):
to get as much engagement as possible. There's the fear
that an ad company would turn a media company into
just a way to display as many ads as possible.
The site had reportedly actually kind of made a slight
recovery over the years after the disaster that was the
dig version four rollout. It wasn't anything close to what
it was in its heyday, but it was doing better
(26:49):
than it had been, so there was this question of
would this mean that DIG would lose what little momentum
it grab back post Beta Works acquisition. Well, there's not
a ton of information out there about this, but Kaylee
Barber of Digit Day did cite some unnamed former Dig
(27:12):
employees who explained what happened in the wake of this
acquisition deal. This was in an article that was titled
ad tech companies have stopped innovating Why Buy sell Ads
is buying up media brands? So it wasn't just about
Buy sell Ads and Dig. There was also a discussion
about another outlay called Pando, but it was had a
(27:35):
lot of Dig in it. This article published back on
October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, so it's a few years
old now, and according to those unnamed former Dig employees,
the technology team at DIG was essentially let go upon
the conclusion of this deal, So the whole tech team
at Dig is gone. Some of them would actually end
(27:58):
up being hired on by a blockchain focused journalism marketplace
that was called Civil. Unfortunately for them, Civil would give
up the ghost two years later in twenty twenty. It
shut down after the leadership team at Civil determined that
the business was just not sustainable, particularly in the wake
of a massive decline in the blockchain slash crypto industry.
(28:23):
By sell Ads reportedly absorbed the DIG sales team and
the business side of the staff into its own operations,
so they essentially said, all right, we're going to bring
you in as buy sell Ads team members, not specifically
DIG team members. Out of the editorial staff, things were
pretty rough. Within a year of the deal being announced,
(28:48):
a general manager, two full time original content editors, and
a video editor were all laid off from DIG. Others
who had been working in an editorial capacity left on
their own, and when Barbera wrote her article for digitay
back in twenty nineteen, she said the entire editorial staff
(29:09):
at dig at that point consisted of five full time
employees and one part time staff member. That was essentially
what was left of dig. Okay, We're going to take
another quick break. When I come back, I'll wrap up
this update on what's been going on with dig Okay,
(29:39):
So we're back. Uh. I was talking about how Digg's
staff was whittled down after the acquisition when Bisellads bought
a majority stake in the company. But as for DIG itself.
It still exists. Dig dot com is a website you
can go and you can visit it. The site posts
(29:59):
new art articles on a regular basis. I checked. I
was making sure because I mean, sometimes you go to
these things and you're like, oh, there's a ton of
articles here, and then you click through and you're like, oh,
this was posted like eighteen months ago. That's not the
case with Dig. There are a lot of new articles
on the various categories that Dig covers, which includes again
stuff like news and gaming and sports. Based on the
(30:22):
bylines that I saw, to me, at least, it looks
like there's a pretty small editorial staff in place. There.
There might be a couple of freelancers who write for Dig,
but mostly I'm just seeing the same names pop up
over and over again. It also looks to me that
they are mostly referencing news items that are posted elsewhere,
(30:45):
like maybe it's a press release, or in some cases
they're referencing a news article that went on some other
media outlet. That is not to cast shade on them, right,
I'm not saying they're doing a bad job because they're
going to other news sites and saying this article over
here says blah blah blah. Lots of outlets out there
(31:07):
do this. Business Insider does this all the time. You'll
go there and they'll say, like Reuter's Reports or Fast
Company Reports or whatever. I also can't imagine that any
of the staff on Dig's editorial group has an opportunity
to do any sort of investigative journalism. I don't think
that they have the time to do that, because from
(31:28):
what I see, it looks like a lot of them
are posting multiple articles per day, and at that level
of output, you don't have time to do things like
take extra steps and really do investigative work. It's just
impossible if you have an output quota that you need
to meet. Clearly, Dig does not resemble what it used
(31:50):
to be when it was first launched, not by a
long shot. But that raises another question, how is it
doing as far as performance goes. That's a great question.
It's also a question that's very hard to answer, largely
because third party web traffic analytics are not what I
would call accurate or even reliable. So let me give
(32:12):
you a pair of examples supposedly about DIG. This kind
of illustrates why it's hard to get insight into how
well a website is doing unless you have direct access
to internal analytics. So if I search for digs web
traffic analytics on like Google and I pull up a
(32:35):
couple of different firms, I can get very different information.
And in fact I did do this, So one of
the companies I looked at was sem Rush sem Rush,
and using sem Rush, I'm told that the most recent
number of monthly visitors to dig dot com was eight
point nine million. That that was for like August. Eight
(32:59):
point nine million monthly users isn't terrible, it is still
a fraction of what digsaw back in its glory days,
and sam Rush ranks the site as being eleven two
and twenty seven by web traffic in the world or
twenty eight hundred nineteenth in the United States. Further, it
says the average person who's visitingdig dot com sticks around
(33:21):
for around eight and a half minutes per visit, and
that there is a bounce rate of fifty six point
h four percent, which means slightly more than half of
the people who visit dig navigate away immediately. Like they
come to dig dot com, they take a look and
then they go somewhere else, and that the other slightly
(33:41):
less than half are the ones who are sticking around
and apparently spending eight and a half minutes on the site.
But let's say we hop over to a competing web
analytics service called similar web. Well, then we get some
very different information. So similar web marks the bounce straight
at fifty four point one seven percent. Now that's actually
(34:03):
pretty darn close to sem rush, right. Sem Rush said
fifty six point oh four. Similar web says fifty four
point one point seven. That's close enough where you could say, oh,
there's probably some margin of error that accounts for this discrepancy.
That's not too bad. But sem rush says the most
recent monthly analytics had eight point nine million visitors. Similar
(34:26):
web says, no, no, no, it's four point one million visitors.
That's less than half of what sem rush said. That
is a huge discrepancy. There's no margin of error that's
gonna say greater than fifty percent. You do be useless
to use the tool. If there's a greater than fifty
percent margin of error, why use the tool at all?
(34:48):
You don't have any idea what the real answer is. So, yeah,
four point one million monthly visitors, according to one web
analytics site and eight point nine million. According to another
these do not line up. Moreover, sam Rush said the
average person would stick around for eight and a half minutes, right, Well,
(35:08):
similar Web says no, no, no, it's two and a
half minutes. So again huge discrepancy here. So you see,
I can't really draw any conclusions about how dig is
doing as far as performance and web traffic goes. I
can't even say with any confidence that the site gets
somewhere between four million and nine million visitors per month,
(35:30):
because when you've got a discrepancy that that's big, how
can you draw any conclusion whatsoever. I do think it
is safe to say that whatever dig is seeing in
monthly traffic, it is not close to what it was
before the disastrous rollout of dig version four. I also
mentioned that I would get back to saying something about
(35:51):
buy sell ads. Now, before I get into any of this,
there's some disclaimers I need to make. I have to
stress the information I saw is based off a a
very very small number of reviews for the company from
supposed customers of buy sell ads. And we should also
remember that the people who are most likely to post
(36:13):
ads are the ones who have had a negative experience.
It is much more rare for someone who had a
positive experience to just say that everything went smoothly, unless
it was a truly positive experience, in which case then
they might leave a review. So I don't want this
to come across as anything close to a definitive overview
of buy sell Ads. What I will say is the
(36:34):
trust Pilot score for buy sell ads is in the gutter.
It is at one point nine out of a possible five.
Ninety three percent of the reviews are one star. But
again this is for a very very small number of reviews.
There are just fourteen reviews on trust Pilot about buy
(36:54):
sell Ads. The reviews do reference similar complaints. So on
the publisher side, one review claimed that they signed up
for service with bisell ads, received a notification about an
advertiser wanting to post an AD to the site, and
so they then approved the ad. Like that's how it works, right.
Buysell ads matches advertisers to the sites, says they're offering
(37:17):
to publish an AD on your site, yay or nay,
and this person said yay. Then they said that they
saw by sell ads had been canceling some of the
agreed upon ad deals that they had agreed on this
ad deal. The ad maybe ran for a while, but
then got canceled early on, and the reason sited was fraud.
(37:38):
Then they found out that their entire site was removed
from buy sell ads marketplace because it quote unquote attracts fraud. Now,
if we assume that this is an honest review, which
is a big assumption already, this obviously raises flags because
it was by sell Ads that was sending the ad
(37:59):
offers to the public sure in the first place. So presumably,
if there are any issues with fraud, Buy sell ads
should have an obligation to find that out and prevent
it from getting to this stage. If the publisher is
just approving opportunities that buy sell ads is presenting to them,
how is the publisher responsible for the ads if those
(38:22):
ads are actually fraudulent. But again, this is all assuming
the review itself is honest. Other reviews came in from
the advertising side, with several people saying they had engaged
buy sell ads to place ads in various campaigns, only
to find the campaign account shut down after a short
amount of time, and then they were trying desperately to
(38:43):
get a refund on the ad campaign because the campaign
would be shut down prematurely, their own account would get
shut down, and yet they would have been charged for
the service. And the ads often mentioned that getting in
touch with customer service at buy sell ads was practically impossible.
But again, this is just fourteen reviews. That is far
(39:06):
too small a number to even remotely call it a
sample size, and it could very well be that none
of those reviews are entirely honest or accurate, or even
remotely so I think it's only fair to point out
that if you were to go to a site like
G two dot com, there are just twelve reviews for
by sell ads there. But those twelve reviews create an
(39:27):
aggregate score of three point eight out of five, which
isn't stellar, but it's way better than one point nine
at trust pilot. Right. So again, a lot of the
reviews that are on G two dot com are actually
four or five star reviews. There's one was like a
no star review which brought the average down, and in fact,
(39:49):
I think it may have been one of the same
people who left a review over at trust pilot. So
I can't make any real conclusion about by sell ads.
There's just too little data. There's no way to tell
whether or not people like it or don't like it.
There's just not that much information, and part of that,
I think is because it's still a relatively small company.
(40:11):
But that's the update on Dig and its current corporate overlord.
I think about Dig the same way I think about MySpace,
because technically there is still a site that's still Dig,
but it doesn't remotely resemble what it used to be,
and it has a fraction of the mind share that
it once commanded. Like, I don't think people talk about
(40:32):
Dig anymore unless they're like, hey, do you remember when
everyone was using dig? That's the context they use that in.
I wouldn't go so far to say that Dig's grave
has been dug, because trust me, there's no shortage of
articles out there that have a similar pun to them.
But I will say Dig is not even close to
what it used to be, and I have no reason
(40:53):
to expect that to change in the foreseeable future. Maybe
there'll be another change in ownership of Dig in the
future that brings it back to this more democratized approach
as what Dig was when it first launched. But unless
you can do that and also find a way to
generate revenue so that you know you could pay for
the whole thing. It may be a non starter because
(41:16):
if the only thing you can do is seek out
endless rounds of venture capital funding, sooner or later that
gravy train is going to come to an end and
you'll be really stuck. I think a lot of Dig's
problems actually came out of the fact that the company
was looking for ways to monetize in a way that
(41:36):
would be sustainable, and unfortunately a lot of those ways
were in conflict with the very features that the community valued,
and that was really a problem. We've see this over
and over. Right. Twitter is the same way we saw
a lot with Twitter, where the things that people valued
with Twitter were things that weren't easily monetizable, and the
(41:57):
ways to monetize Twitter were things that rubbed people the
wrong way. And that's continuing today as Twitter has transformed
into x. So. Yeah, not an unusual story when it
comes to web startups. Anyway. That's the update on Dig.
Not much else I can say of any real substance.
(42:17):
I would love to learn more about it, and maybe
I'll reach out to some of the people who are,
you know, apparently writing articles for Dig just to kind
of get an idea of what it's like, because you know,
it could very well be that everyone there is incredibly happy.
Based upon the output, I would imagine it's got to
be pretty stressful. I remember when I was writing an
(42:40):
article a day and how that was really putting a
large stress on me. I mean, I do a podcast
a day pretty much here, and that is pretty stressful.
I can't imagine doing multiple ones a day. That would
be pretty tough. Anyway, that's the update. I hope you
are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(43:07):
Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? So, just last Friday, we published a
tech Stuff classic episode called the Dig Story, and I
(00:28):
was thinking, I should probably do a very quick update
on what's been going on with Dig since twenty seventeen,
except you know me, I don't do quick updates because
I'm a chatty Cathy. So we're gonna do that. We're
gonna do an update on what's been happening with Dig
since twenty seventeen. But first I want to go back
and talk over kind of what happened with Dig in
(00:50):
the first place, just in case you didn't listen to
the original episode or the classic that published on Friday,
so that you're not totally in the dark. So Dig
originally law lunched in late two thousand and four, and
it was essentially a news aggregator site. Dig started off
as a site where users, the visitors, the members of
DIG would be able to share links to stuff that
(01:12):
they thought was useful or cool or entertaining or you
know whatever, and It was a site that was all
about discovery and sharing discovery. So search engines are great, right, Like,
if you are looking for something specific, then you can
go to a search engine and you can find a
link to something that answers your specific question. That's fantastic.
(01:35):
But what if you're just in the mood to you know,
browse and to see what's going on specifically, like what's
what's more important right now today? What is happening? What
if you didn't really know what you wanted to see
or read, you just knew that you wanted something, Then
a site like dig or Reddit, which launched not long
(01:56):
after Dig did and was Dig's big competitor, a site
like that could be a huge help. So Dig really
focused on the recent and the timely. They really were
hyper focused on things like tech and gaming and sports
and news, that kind of stuff like that was really
where they were focusing. Sharing a link on Dig then
(02:19):
gave the entire community the opportunity to weigh in on
whether they thought that particular story was important or not.
So if folks thought it was interesting or important and
they had a Dig account, they could boost the story
up the page ranking. This was called digging, an article,
(02:40):
and if an article received enough digs, it would get
promoted to the front page of Dig, which in turn
was being called the front page of the Internet. If
the community thought the story was lame or that, you know,
maybe it was already represented within Dig, whatever that might be,
you could vote it down. This was called burying an article.
(03:02):
The philosophy behind Dig was that the community determined what
stuff on the Internet was actually worth looking at. It
was giving power to the people. Now, none of that
would matter unless people actually used Dig. If it had
never attracted users, then it just would have been a
curiosity and nothing more. But it actually did attract quite
(03:23):
a few users. People began to flock to the site
and use it a lot, so their participation would ultimately
end up having a larger impact on the web in general.
Because if you had a piece that showed up on
Dig's front page, that could mean a significant boost traffic
as people checked out, you know, they click on the
article and go to your site. So Dig could end
(03:44):
up being really influential. There was this thing called the
Dig effect that was a big deal when Dig was,
you know, in its heyday, but just a couple of
years after launching the site, one of the co founders,
Kevin Rose, who was a personality really at that time.
He was on tech TV and had a show, a
(04:06):
podcast that he launched called Dignation The Pretty Famous Dude.
He started to encounter a frustrating experience because there were
some companies that were interested in purchasing Dig, and Rose
was like, yeah, I don't mind the idea of selling
it because he really liked creating stuff and getting it going.
(04:27):
But he was less interested in just sticking around forever. Right,
He liked the creative process. But he couldn't just sell
Dig and then move on to something else because Dig
had a board of directors who ultimately had the authority
of that decision about whether or not to sell a company,
and the board was convinced that the incoming offers, such
(04:51):
as one from news Corp. News Corps, which had famously
purchased MySpace, just undervalued the company. So news Corp's offer
was said to be somewhere around sixty million dollars, but
the board director said, no, that's way too low. We
need to have a much higher offer before we will
consider selling. So Rose couldn't sell to news Corp. He
(05:13):
just had to sort of sit back and continue working
on the site. Reportedly, he became less interested in doing
that over his time at DIG, so he thought it
would have been better to cash out and created a
new project, but he was beholden to the board. By
two thousand and eight, there was a much larger deal
that was in the works between Dig and Google. Now,
(05:35):
the rumor was that Google offered to acquire Dig for
the princely sum of two hundred million dollars, so it
looked like maybe the Bard directors had been right right,
like they had said sixty millions too low, and then
a couple of years later the offer's two hundred million. However,
(05:56):
that deal never actually happened. Negotiations fell apart for one
reason or another, perhaps a whole bunch of different reasons,
and Google did not go through with the deal. In
twenty ten, Dig tackled an ambitious and drastic redesign known
as DIG Version four. Reportedly, Kevin Rose made a huge
(06:16):
number of changes as part of a venture capital funding round,
and upon launch, this rollout was a disaster. The redesign
went from the very foundation of how Dig worked, like
even the actual technology that powered everything was changed, and
(06:37):
the changes went all the way through to user interface
and experience, and it turned out that not only did
it get rid of a lot of stuff that DIG
users valued, it was not ready for deployment when it
went live because people started to encounter frustrating glitches while
interacting with the new design. The whole website would crash
(06:57):
repeatedly throughout the day when the site was working, which
was never a guarantee. Users were very upset to see
historic features just missing from the experience, so, for example,
the option to bury a post was gone. Perhaps more
upsetting was the fact that this new version of dig
(07:17):
would allow news sites to automatically submit articles to DIG,
so instead of everything being user generated and user submitted,
now the news agencies could actually submit stuff themselves directly
to dig. It no longer was in the community's hands.
There was also a lot of complaints, although I never
found like any real strong corroborating evidence, but there were
(07:42):
a lot of complaints that some power users at DIG
had a disproportionate amount of control of what could be
seen and what would not make it to the front page,
and that meant the community as a whole found itself
unable to really get stuff seen on the main page,
so it was very disheartening. Alexis Ohanian, one of the
(08:03):
co founders of Reddit, you know, the big competitor to Dig,
actually published an open letter to Kevin Rose saying that
the new features in version four suggested that the team
had allowed investors to really weigh in on what should
and should not be part of the platform, and that
rather than listening to the community and responding to what
the community wanted, the site was listening to the money,
(08:25):
and that that in turn was alienating Dig's users. And
it turns out that, you know, a lot of what
he was saying was right, because a ton of Dig
users abandoned Dig. Many of them actually migrated on over
to Reddit. But that's another story, because Reddit itself has
had its own ups and downs, including a very tumultuous
(08:47):
twenty twenty three. Anyway, the various co founders of Dig
started to leave the company over time. By twenty eleven,
Kevin Rose was bouncing from the company as well. Lots
of users had Traffic was dr being precipitously. It was bad. Meanwhile,
social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were also growing rapidly
(09:08):
and taking over some of the functions that Dig had
performed because now folks could create a profile on a
system that prioritized communities and networks, at least that's what
they claimed to do. Then they could share stuff with
their friends on these platforms, So it was social first
(09:28):
and then content second. Kind of approach you could argue
Dig was maybe you know, content and social together, or
maybe even content first, social second. But the point is
Dig was seeing other sites drink its milkshake. On top
of all that, other companies were poaching talent from Dig.
(09:49):
The Washington Post company hired more than a dozen of
digs site engineers, for example, so it was pretty clear
Dig was on borrow time. In twenty twelve, Dig would
kind of of get sold for parts. Different parts of
Dig were sold off to other companies, but the site
itself and the underlying tech and the ip of what
(10:10):
made dig dig ended up going to a company called
Beta Works, and the price tag had dropped from that
theoretical high of two hundred million dollars with Google to
a much less grandiose half million. Don't get me wrong,
half a million dollars is a lot of money, It
just doesn't measure up to some of the earlier offers.
(10:32):
DIG had turned away in its history. I should also
add there's some dispute about that five hundred thousand dollars
sales price. That's what everyone reported, just about everyone anyway,
but tech crunches Frederick Lardinois reported that the actual deal
was considerably larger and included not just cash but also
(10:53):
equity in the company, and so the value was much
higher than what reports had suggested. In that same article,
he pointed out that Dig's annual ad revenue was likely
more than half a million dollars a year, so it
wouldn't really make sense to sell the company for half
a million dollars. But then again, Vox dot com reported
(11:14):
that Dig ran its entire service off of servers that
were on premises. You know, it wasn't a cloud based
company at that point, so it was really before cloud
competing had made it less expensive to run huge websites. Like,
if your website had a fairly modest user base, then
you probably wouldn't be seeing enormous bills per month. But
(11:36):
for Dig, because of how popular it was, Vox estimated
that it would cost a quarter million dollars a month
just to keep the site running. So then you're like, well,
even if your your revenue is more than half a
million dollars, If your monthly costs are two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, you're in trouble unless you're making significantly
(11:57):
more than half a million dollars a year. But whatever
the scope of the deal, however much it ended up
being under Beta Works, DIG would relaunch in the summer
of twenty twelve with an entirely different approach to content.
So instead of having users determine what material would make
up the front page, DIG featured an editorially curated front page. So,
(12:19):
in other words, DIG determined what went on Dig, not
users that were still like scoring systems in place and
that kind of stuff, but the fundamental operation of DIG
had totally transformed. Now that's pretty much where I left
off in that twenty seventeen episode. At that time, DIG
was still under the ownership of Beta Works, the company.
(12:41):
Beta Works typically focuses on startups that are at the
earliest stages of development. So Beta Works looks out for
interesting projects and then provides what's called seed stage funding,
which is the initial money that a startup needs in
order to kind of coalesce from an idea into something real.
Seed money helped startups do things like attract the right
(13:03):
talent and put together the earliest plans for how the
company will actually operate. To take over Dig was a
little bit outside the wheelhouse for that kind of company, though,
as I understand it, Beta Works mary Dig with a
socially driven news web app it had in development called
news dot Me. One thing Beta Works did have under
(13:23):
its belt was the service bit dot l y, the
URL shortener. That's another episode. It also helped develop tweet Deck,
which Twitter would ultimately purchase, but again that's a matter
for another episode. The heyday of Dig was over at
this point, and finding news articles and stuff from the
Beta Works era of Dig isn't that easy because people
(13:45):
had moved on. Reddit absorbed a ton of digs community,
and the new Dig was largely viewed as just another
web based news site. So really, in that stretch between
twenty twelve and two eighteen, there aren't that many news
items about Dig. But then things would change. I'll explain
(14:07):
more after we take this quick break. Okay, So, like
I said before the break, between twenty twelve and twenty eighteen,
you didn't see that many news stories about Dig. It
(14:28):
just seemed to be performing like a basic web page
that had news items on it, most of which were
either written by an internal editorial team or were connecting
to external news sources. So the next big bit of
Dig's history that I have to share happened. In early
(14:49):
spring twenty eighteen, Dig announced that it was shutting down
it's OURSS reader tool. So for those of y'all who
are not familiar with RSS, it stayed for really Simple Syndication,
or maybe it stands for RDF Site Summary. RDF in
turn stands for Resource Description Framework. There's actually disagreement on
(15:12):
what RSS stands for, but really the initialism doesn't matter.
RSS allows for the distribution of web updates or Internet
content in general to lots of other stuff. So what
does that actually mean? Well, let's take an example with podcasts.
How does your podcast app, whichever one you use, how
(15:35):
does it know when there is a new episode of
the shows that you subscribe to. Well, podcasts published to
a platform, and each podcast has an RSS feed associated
with it, your podcatching service checks for updates to the
various RSS feeds out there all the shows that you
subscribe to. So let's say that you subscribe to tech stuff,
(15:58):
it does a check to see is there a new
tech stuff episode? If there has not been an update
since the last time it did this check, nothing changes you,
no notifications, nothing like that. If when it checks the
RSS link and it finds an update, finds out there's
been a new episode added to the feed, your podcasting
(16:20):
app will say, Hey, there's a brand new episode of
that show you like, so you can listen to it
whenever you like. RSS tech led to the development of
RSS readers, So these tools let you subscribe to various
sources and you can view updates to those websites within
the reader itself. So instead of physically navigating to like
(16:44):
a dozen different websites that you like in order to
just see if anything's new. Let's say that you know
you typically visit four different news sites, a couple of
gaming sites. Maybe you visit I don't know, let's say
it's a financial site and you do all these and
those are typically the ones you go to. Instead of
(17:06):
going to each of those individually and looking to see
if there are any updates, you could use an RSS
reader that would just list out in chronological order reverse
chronological order, typically what the latest headlines are from the
various sources, and they would usually let you organize these
in various ways, so you could put all of your
sports relaid stuff in one place, you know, all of
(17:27):
your gaming stuff in another place, et cetera, and you
could just go through and look for headlines that caught
your interest. And you don't have to go to each
website individually just to see what the updates are. You
consolidate everything into a single view. It's incredibly useful. But
by twenty eighteen, the glory of the RSS reader days
was well in the past. A lot of companies that
(17:49):
had previously offered RSS readers had since shut them down.
For instance, Google shut down Google Reader way back in
twenty thirty. There are still folks out there today, a
decade later who are sore about that. I'm one of them. Honestly,
RSS readers really made it useful to get a quick
(18:12):
look at news, and there still are some out there.
I don't want to say that they don't exist anymore,
but some of the biggest ones have long since gone away. Anyway,
Dig had maintained its own RSS reader tool, and it
was fittingly enough called dig Reader, but in March twenty eighteen,
Dig announced that the feature would end on March twenty sixth.
(18:36):
Molly Mchughotharinger dot com posted a full article about this
and lamented the fact that it was the latest in
a long string of setbacks for people who just wanted
to be able to view web updates chronologically or reverse chronologically.
MCEU pointed out that a lot of platforms were leaning
harder and harder on algorithms to determine what a user
(18:59):
would actually see, and that these algorithms valued engagement and
sharing over quality. This internment, we were getting a lot
more junk, fake stuff, and misinformation put in front of us,
things that would grab our attention but not necessarily reflect reality.
That probably sounds familiar, right because we we've been talking
(19:23):
about that for a couple of years a lot, But
this was way back in twenty eighteen. It just hasn't
gotten any better. MCEW expressed sadness that yet another RSS
reader was going the way of the DODO, because it
marked another example of how it was growing increasingly hard
for an individual to curate their own web experience. Instead,
(19:47):
the various platforms out there, particularly social networks, were taking
over that task for us and dictating to us what
we would see as opposed to letting us say, Hey,
I'm really just interested in reading information from these sources
because I feel those sources are really reliable, so I
(20:07):
just want to see those Those options were going away anyway.
Just one month later after they shut down dig Reader,
even bigger news came out of dig. Beta Works sold
off a majority steak in DIG to another company called
buy sell Ads. It would not be a total acquisition.
(20:30):
Beta Works CEO John Borthwick indicated that Dig's previous shareholders,
including Beta Works itself, would retain some steak in DIG.
The actual details of the deal remained private. So to
this day, I have no clue how much buy sell
Ads spent in order to get a majority steak. I
(20:52):
don't even know what level that majority steak is, right,
I don't know what percentage of dig i sell ads owns,
but what the heck is buy sell Ads. That all
started with a guy named Todd Garland. He got his
start as a web designer, and he found that the
(21:14):
part he liked the least about creating web pages or
administering web pages was the whole process of securing ads
for web pages to help generate revenue. He found that
entire process to be slow and frustrating and overly complicated,
and he thought, what if you could build some software
(21:38):
to automate as much of that process as you possibly can,
to make it faster and simpler for the end users.
What if you could remove all those hurdles that typically
exist and through software, just make it a much less
painful experience. To that end, he built buy sell ads
(21:59):
so that from say a web page standpoint, a publisher standpoint,
a web admin wouldn't have to do anything other than
perhaps set a rate, you know, say like, all right,
this is how much I will charge an advertiser to
make use of the real estate on my web page.
And then that person would just wait to see which
(22:21):
ad requests get sent to them through this service and
then approve or deny from there, and that would get
things going. On the advertiser side. All they had to
do was determine if the ad rate made sense, Like
if they said, well, does it make sense for us
to pay this much? Are we going to get enough
traffic for that to be a good investment? And if so,
(22:44):
then they could say, all right, well we will. We're
interested in including this particular publisher as part of our
ad campaign, and that would be it. At least that
was the idea. I'll come back to buy sell ads
because the reputation of that company is a little up
(23:05):
in the air as far as I can tell, although
from extremely limited information, so keep all that in mind.
At any rate, Buy sell ads seemed like it was
an odd fit to purchase a majority share in an
online media company, But then you could also argue that
Beta Works was a weird fit, and Beta Works had
(23:27):
done it way back in twenty twelve. However, when you
really start to think about it, I argue the buy
sell ads acquisition makes a little more sense because an
ad company does serve two sets of customers. Right. You've
got your advertisers, who want to get ads in front
of people, preferably people who are more likely going to
(23:48):
act on the ad than otherwise. And then you've got
your publishers, the people who have real estate to offer
that they want to monetize on their sites or to
generate revenue. A company like buy sell ads has to
satisfy both groups, right. They have to satisfy both the
advertisers and the publishers, and by gaining majority ownership of
(24:11):
a publisher, because that's what dig is at this point.
It's a publisher. It's not an aggregator anymore, not really. Well,
that means that buy sell ads now has a platform
where it can actively test out new strategies. It can
deploy new approaches to matching ads to content. It can
look and see which of these are working well and
(24:33):
which ones don't like, which ones are generating more click
through which ones are not, and using that as like
a testing ground, it can then perhaps deploy strategies across
larger groups of customers. In addition to that, it also
this is something that Todd Garland has actually said, Buy
(24:54):
sell ads can try and design a publication platform strategy
that in theory maximizes the publisher's ability to monetize their site.
And then once they have figured out that strategy, they
can then license that to other publishers. So, in other words,
they come up with a process that other publishers can follow,
(25:18):
and by paying buy sell ads, they'll say, here's how
you do it, and just work with us, and we'll
make sure that we match you with advertisers that are
going to make the best use of your platform, and
everyone's happy. The advertisers get their ads acted on by
a larger audience, you get a bigger payout because of
the ad revenue coming in, and we all get rich. However,
(25:41):
buy sell ads. Purchasing dig made some folks feel anxious
is probably too big a word, because at this point
dig it really wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't
really in the mind share of your average netizin if
I am to use outdated terminology. So that being said,
(26:02):
people were still thinking, well, it might not be a
great relationship for an ad company to purchase a media company.
That almost seems like a conflict of interests right. You
can definitely see how an ad company might change the
media company so that it just is a vehicle for
delivering ads, similar to how the algorithm really just wants
(26:25):
to get as much engagement as possible. There's the fear
that an ad company would turn a media company into
just a way to display as many ads as possible.
The site had reportedly actually kind of made a slight
recovery over the years after the disaster that was the
dig version four rollout. It wasn't anything close to what
it was in its heyday, but it was doing better
(26:49):
than it had been, so there was this question of
would this mean that DIG would lose what little momentum
it grab back post Beta Works acquisition. Well, there's not
a ton of information out there about this, but Kaylee
Barber of Digit Day did cite some unnamed former Dig
(27:12):
employees who explained what happened in the wake of this
acquisition deal. This was in an article that was titled
ad tech companies have stopped innovating Why Buy sell Ads
is buying up media brands? So it wasn't just about
Buy sell Ads and Dig. There was also a discussion
about another outlay called Pando, but it was had a
(27:35):
lot of Dig in it. This article published back on
October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, so it's a few years
old now, and according to those unnamed former Dig employees,
the technology team at DIG was essentially let go upon
the conclusion of this deal, So the whole tech team
at Dig is gone. Some of them would actually end
(27:58):
up being hired on by a blockchain focused journalism marketplace
that was called Civil. Unfortunately for them, Civil would give
up the ghost two years later in twenty twenty. It
shut down after the leadership team at Civil determined that
the business was just not sustainable, particularly in the wake
of a massive decline in the blockchain slash crypto industry.
(28:23):
By sell Ads reportedly absorbed the DIG sales team and
the business side of the staff into its own operations,
so they essentially said, all right, we're going to bring
you in as buy sell Ads team members, not specifically
DIG team members. Out of the editorial staff, things were
pretty rough. Within a year of the deal being announced,
(28:48):
a general manager, two full time original content editors, and
a video editor were all laid off from DIG. Others
who had been working in an editorial capacity left on
their own, and when Barbera wrote her article for digitay
back in twenty nineteen, she said the entire editorial staff
(29:09):
at dig at that point consisted of five full time
employees and one part time staff member. That was essentially
what was left of dig. Okay, We're going to take
another quick break. When I come back, I'll wrap up
this update on what's been going on with dig Okay,
(29:39):
So we're back. Uh. I was talking about how Digg's
staff was whittled down after the acquisition when Bisellads bought
a majority stake in the company. But as for DIG itself.
It still exists. Dig dot com is a website you
can go and you can visit it. The site posts
(29:59):
new art articles on a regular basis. I checked. I
was making sure because I mean, sometimes you go to
these things and you're like, oh, there's a ton of
articles here, and then you click through and you're like, oh,
this was posted like eighteen months ago. That's not the
case with Dig. There are a lot of new articles
on the various categories that Dig covers, which includes again
stuff like news and gaming and sports. Based on the
(30:22):
bylines that I saw, to me, at least, it looks
like there's a pretty small editorial staff in place. There.
There might be a couple of freelancers who write for Dig,
but mostly I'm just seeing the same names pop up
over and over again. It also looks to me that
they are mostly referencing news items that are posted elsewhere,
(30:45):
like maybe it's a press release, or in some cases
they're referencing a news article that went on some other
media outlet. That is not to cast shade on them, right,
I'm not saying they're doing a bad job because they're
going to other news sites and saying this article over
here says blah blah blah. Lots of outlets out there
(31:07):
do this. Business Insider does this all the time. You'll
go there and they'll say, like Reuter's Reports or Fast
Company Reports or whatever. I also can't imagine that any
of the staff on Dig's editorial group has an opportunity
to do any sort of investigative journalism. I don't think
that they have the time to do that, because from
(31:28):
what I see, it looks like a lot of them
are posting multiple articles per day, and at that level
of output, you don't have time to do things like
take extra steps and really do investigative work. It's just
impossible if you have an output quota that you need
to meet. Clearly, Dig does not resemble what it used
(31:50):
to be when it was first launched, not by a
long shot. But that raises another question, how is it
doing as far as performance goes. That's a great question.
It's also a question that's very hard to answer, largely
because third party web traffic analytics are not what I
would call accurate or even reliable. So let me give
(32:12):
you a pair of examples supposedly about DIG. This kind
of illustrates why it's hard to get insight into how
well a website is doing unless you have direct access
to internal analytics. So if I search for digs web
traffic analytics on like Google and I pull up a
(32:35):
couple of different firms, I can get very different information.
And in fact I did do this, So one of
the companies I looked at was sem Rush sem Rush,
and using sem Rush, I'm told that the most recent
number of monthly visitors to dig dot com was eight
point nine million. That that was for like August. Eight
(32:59):
point nine million monthly users isn't terrible, it is still
a fraction of what digsaw back in its glory days,
and sam Rush ranks the site as being eleven two
and twenty seven by web traffic in the world or
twenty eight hundred nineteenth in the United States. Further, it
says the average person who's visitingdig dot com sticks around
(33:21):
for around eight and a half minutes per visit, and
that there is a bounce rate of fifty six point
h four percent, which means slightly more than half of
the people who visit dig navigate away immediately. Like they
come to dig dot com, they take a look and
then they go somewhere else, and that the other slightly
(33:41):
less than half are the ones who are sticking around
and apparently spending eight and a half minutes on the site.
But let's say we hop over to a competing web
analytics service called similar web. Well, then we get some
very different information. So similar web marks the bounce straight
at fifty four point one seven percent. Now that's actually
(34:03):
pretty darn close to sem rush, right. Sem Rush said
fifty six point oh four. Similar web says fifty four
point one point seven. That's close enough where you could say, oh,
there's probably some margin of error that accounts for this discrepancy.
That's not too bad. But sem rush says the most
recent monthly analytics had eight point nine million visitors. Similar
(34:26):
web says, no, no, no, it's four point one million visitors.
That's less than half of what sem rush said. That
is a huge discrepancy. There's no margin of error that's
gonna say greater than fifty percent. You do be useless
to use the tool. If there's a greater than fifty
percent margin of error, why use the tool at all?
(34:48):
You don't have any idea what the real answer is. So, yeah,
four point one million monthly visitors, according to one web
analytics site and eight point nine million. According to another
these do not line up. Moreover, sam Rush said the
average person would stick around for eight and a half minutes, right, Well,
(35:08):
similar Web says no, no, no, it's two and a
half minutes. So again huge discrepancy here. So you see,
I can't really draw any conclusions about how dig is
doing as far as performance and web traffic goes. I
can't even say with any confidence that the site gets
somewhere between four million and nine million visitors per month,
(35:30):
because when you've got a discrepancy that that's big, how
can you draw any conclusion whatsoever. I do think it
is safe to say that whatever dig is seeing in
monthly traffic, it is not close to what it was
before the disastrous rollout of dig version four. I also
mentioned that I would get back to saying something about
(35:51):
buy sell ads. Now, before I get into any of this,
there's some disclaimers I need to make. I have to
stress the information I saw is based off a a
very very small number of reviews for the company from
supposed customers of buy sell ads. And we should also
remember that the people who are most likely to post
(36:13):
ads are the ones who have had a negative experience.
It is much more rare for someone who had a
positive experience to just say that everything went smoothly, unless
it was a truly positive experience, in which case then
they might leave a review. So I don't want this
to come across as anything close to a definitive overview
of buy sell Ads. What I will say is the
(36:34):
trust Pilot score for buy sell ads is in the gutter.
It is at one point nine out of a possible five.
Ninety three percent of the reviews are one star. But
again this is for a very very small number of reviews.
There are just fourteen reviews on trust Pilot about buy
(36:54):
sell Ads. The reviews do reference similar complaints. So on
the publisher side, one review claimed that they signed up
for service with bisell ads, received a notification about an
advertiser wanting to post an AD to the site, and
so they then approved the ad. Like that's how it works, right.
Buysell ads matches advertisers to the sites, says they're offering
(37:17):
to publish an AD on your site, yay or nay,
and this person said yay. Then they said that they
saw by sell ads had been canceling some of the
agreed upon ad deals that they had agreed on this
ad deal. The ad maybe ran for a while, but
then got canceled early on, and the reason sited was fraud.
(37:38):
Then they found out that their entire site was removed
from buy sell ads marketplace because it quote unquote attracts fraud. Now,
if we assume that this is an honest review, which
is a big assumption already, this obviously raises flags because
it was by sell Ads that was sending the ad
(37:59):
offers to the public sure in the first place. So presumably,
if there are any issues with fraud, Buy sell ads
should have an obligation to find that out and prevent
it from getting to this stage. If the publisher is
just approving opportunities that buy sell ads is presenting to them,
how is the publisher responsible for the ads if those
(38:22):
ads are actually fraudulent. But again, this is all assuming
the review itself is honest. Other reviews came in from
the advertising side, with several people saying they had engaged
buy sell ads to place ads in various campaigns, only
to find the campaign account shut down after a short
amount of time, and then they were trying desperately to
(38:43):
get a refund on the ad campaign because the campaign
would be shut down prematurely, their own account would get
shut down, and yet they would have been charged for
the service. And the ads often mentioned that getting in
touch with customer service at buy sell ads was practically impossible.
But again, this is just fourteen reviews. That is far
(39:06):
too small a number to even remotely call it a
sample size, and it could very well be that none
of those reviews are entirely honest or accurate, or even
remotely so I think it's only fair to point out
that if you were to go to a site like
G two dot com, there are just twelve reviews for
by sell ads there. But those twelve reviews create an
(39:27):
aggregate score of three point eight out of five, which
isn't stellar, but it's way better than one point nine
at trust pilot. Right. So again, a lot of the
reviews that are on G two dot com are actually
four or five star reviews. There's one was like a
no star review which brought the average down, and in fact,
(39:49):
I think it may have been one of the same
people who left a review over at trust pilot. So
I can't make any real conclusion about by sell ads.
There's just too little data. There's no way to tell
whether or not people like it or don't like it.
There's just not that much information, and part of that,
I think is because it's still a relatively small company.
(40:11):
But that's the update on Dig and its current corporate overlord.
I think about Dig the same way I think about MySpace,
because technically there is still a site that's still Dig,
but it doesn't remotely resemble what it used to be,
and it has a fraction of the mind share that
it once commanded. Like, I don't think people talk about
(40:32):
Dig anymore unless they're like, hey, do you remember when
everyone was using dig? That's the context they use that in.
I wouldn't go so far to say that Dig's grave
has been dug, because trust me, there's no shortage of
articles out there that have a similar pun to them.
But I will say Dig is not even close to
what it used to be, and I have no reason
(40:53):
to expect that to change in the foreseeable future. Maybe
there'll be another change in ownership of Dig in the
future that brings it back to this more democratized approach
as what Dig was when it first launched. But unless
you can do that and also find a way to
generate revenue so that you know you could pay for
the whole thing. It may be a non starter because
(41:16):
if the only thing you can do is seek out
endless rounds of venture capital funding, sooner or later that
gravy train is going to come to an end and
you'll be really stuck. I think a lot of Dig's
problems actually came out of the fact that the company
was looking for ways to monetize in a way that
(41:36):
would be sustainable, and unfortunately a lot of those ways
were in conflict with the very features that the community valued,
and that was really a problem. We've see this over
and over. Right. Twitter is the same way we saw
a lot with Twitter, where the things that people valued
with Twitter were things that weren't easily monetizable, and the
(41:57):
ways to monetize Twitter were things that rubbed people the
wrong way. And that's continuing today as Twitter has transformed
into x. So. Yeah, not an unusual story when it
comes to web startups. Anyway. That's the update on Dig.
Not much else I can say of any real substance.
(42:17):
I would love to learn more about it, and maybe
I'll reach out to some of the people who are,
you know, apparently writing articles for Dig just to kind
of get an idea of what it's like, because you know,
it could very well be that everyone there is incredibly happy.
Based upon the output, I would imagine it's got to
be pretty stressful. I remember when I was writing an
(42:40):
article a day and how that was really putting a
large stress on me. I mean, I do a podcast
a day pretty much here, and that is pretty stressful.
I can't imagine doing multiple ones a day. That would
be pretty tough. Anyway, that's the update. I hope you
are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
(43:07):
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