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December 7, 2006

Digg Celebrates 2nd Birthday

Michael Arrington

37 comments »

Two years ago today, after about $2,000 in development costs, Kevin Rose launched Digg and changed the way millions of people consume online news.

The guy that built the original Digg prototype, Owen Byrne, wrote a post on the Digg blog today to mark the birthday. He also includes some great trivia about the site:

Hard to believe, but two years ago today, Kevin decided my code was bug- free enough to take down the beta sign and unleash Digg upon the world. It’s been a crazy and exciting time since then, and we owe it all to you - the loyal and passionate members of the Digg community.

To those of you who have spent countless hours finding the coolest and timeliest content on the Internet, I and the entire Digg team would like to personally thank you for your contributions and loyalty.

Some trivia –

* First story to hit the home page after officially releasing: http://digg.com/tech_news/Google_Cheat_Sheet

* # of users who registered in the first week: 578
* # of registered users today: 707,593

* First 10 users who registered and are still actively Digging:

http://digg.com/users/Waldoze
http://digg.com/users/drinet
http://digg.com/users/mkirk
http://digg.com/users/jkenzer
http://digg.com/users/nickster
http://digg.com/users/Anthony
http://digg.com/users/dkurfurst
http://digg.com/users/bnitro
http://digg.com/users/CUBApete
http://digg.com/users/martinhuard

* # of servers Digg had at launch: 1 (rented)
* # of servers Digg has today: 103

* # of stories submitted the first week: 923
* # of stories submitted last week: 15,412
* # of stories submitted (all-time): 1,001,865

Congratulations to the Digg team. And to their investors, who are going to make a boatload of money. Our extended coverage of Digg is here, and an interview with the founders is here.

The cool logo is care of Go2Web2.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 7th, 2006 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Digg開設2周年

    December 7th, 2006 at 3:19 pm

  2. DrinkaZine Blog » Happy Birthday to Digg

    December 7th, 2006 at 7:34 pm

  3. IT Blogwatch

    December 8th, 2006 at 3:53 am

  4. RidiculousWorld

    December 8th, 2006 at 10:34 am

  5. Digg Breaks Away From All News Focus at Swiss Podcast Directory and Blog

    December 18th, 2006 at 6:09 am

  6. Super Justin » Blog Archive » Digg Upgrades?

    December 18th, 2006 at 6:26 am

  7. Digg Breaks Away From All News Focus

    January 8th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

  8. iMicro.mobi » Digg Breaks Away From All News Focus

    January 13th, 2007 at 2:19 pm

  9. smime » Blog Archive » 103 Servers?

    July 2nd, 2007 at 4:57 am

  10. techcrunch » Blog Archive » Digg Breaks Away From All News Focus

    August 14th, 2007 at 5:07 am

Comments

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  1. Eric Jackson

    December 7th, 2006 at 12:43 pm

    Congrats to them.

    Michael: What’s the latest with them on acquisition rumors?

    Eric

  2. People Finder

    December 7th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    I use Digg every day. Happy B-day Digg!

  3. Dave Coleman

    December 7th, 2006 at 12:52 pm

    Happy b-day digg
    Its good to see some user adoption stats like that. I know at netus we are constantly trying to figure out where we are going to be standing in terms of early adoption. Good post!

  4. Vik

    December 7th, 2006 at 12:54 pm

    Kevin did what most young entrepreneurs dream of: building a great empire from scratch. I get very inspired when I read his story. Many congrats to him & his team.

  5. Tyler

    December 7th, 2006 at 12:58 pm

    happy bday digg!! :P

    Keep up the good work guys & gals! :P

  6. Armadillo

    December 7th, 2006 at 1:03 pm

    I’d think it was “only” $2000 b/c he didn’t pay for his own time. I just do find 2K only hard to digest….. unless was just being facetious.

  7. Morha Shazam

    December 7th, 2006 at 1:39 pm

    yep this is the guy rose paid $10/hr - i certainly hope he has given him more by now - otherwise, thats bullsh**

  8. Darren

    December 7th, 2006 at 2:18 pm

    @Morha

    why he was paid for the job. Ok it might not have been much but he was willing to work for it.

    I am sure he will be looked after when IPO happens. Yes I believe they might go down this route given they seem to be enjoying what they are doing.

  9. Neal

    December 7th, 2006 at 2:24 pm

    Hmm … $2000 in development costs? Sounds to me like someone forgot to include the cost of labor. Even if you devleop it yourself there is still implicit opportunity cost that must be factored.

    I guess my version wouldn’t make as good of a press release however. ;-)

  10. Ralph Dagza

    December 7th, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    I remember watching Kevin Rose on Tech TV and he was talking about digg, months later hes on the cover on business week talking about 60 million worth of assets

  11. Grant

    December 7th, 2006 at 4:04 pm

    My question is: how an event site that is designed for user to contribute event can ever catch the kinda fire Digg has caught on: 578 registered users after first week’s launch? Our site launched 4 weeks ago, now we have 17 register user? Is it not useful? I doubt, anywhere I go, people is telling me group date event is a good idea. I started a small group on meetup.com couple of days ago, now it has 21 memebers, and 65% RSVP the first group dating event for tomorrow night. I’d love to hear more on how to grow a site like digg, or even decently. Thanks!

  12. Swearrington

    December 7th, 2006 at 4:14 pm

    Digg sucks and so don’t you.

  13. Digger

    December 7th, 2006 at 4:21 pm

    Digg have now a Swiss littel Brother =)
    pligg.ch =)

  14. Grant

    December 7th, 2006 at 4:24 pm

    but how to be sucky, literally;)

  15. Jason Sperske

    December 7th, 2006 at 4:47 pm

    I don’t know if it’s about a cool or not cool concept. My site has been up for 4 months now, and we have 2048 members. I attribute that to a lot of factors. Friction of signing up (we try to keep our personal information to a minimum), general usefulness of the service (we let people make and share mix tapes), and in our specific context, promotional channels (all of our music has come directly from artists and labels, so 99% of our users know about us because we shared a mix tape with them and they wanted to hear it and share their own with others). Doing the Meet.com thing is smart (to gain a better understanding of how people see your web site) but it takes a LOT of people to get a self perpetuating mass of users. Thats hard to do with a dating website. Keven Rose had his The Screen Savers gig to get the word out, MySpace had a mailing list for 3 million dating website users to get the ball rolling. I have had the good fortune to know a few musicians ad the willingness to talk to everyone I meet.

  16. Spencer

    December 7th, 2006 at 6:04 pm

    Congrats and happy birthday to Digg, keep it up.

    Oh, and I made the list of the 10 first Diggers:
    http://digg.com/users/CUBApete

    I win :)

  17. Grant

    December 7th, 2006 at 6:26 pm

    wow, a top digger is here!! What made u digg it so much back then, if u don’t mind me asking Spencer?

  18. David Mackey

    December 7th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    Digg is one of my favorite sites, Rose did a great job coming up with this one. Though popularity has been hard on Digg, fighting the spammers is an ongoing battle.

  19. Wes

    December 7th, 2006 at 7:51 pm

    Good to see Digg is still going strong two years on!

  20. Pramit Singh

    December 7th, 2006 at 8:43 pm

    Digg is a great entrepreneur story but not a good enough news revolution.

    Take a look at the criticism.
    http://mediavidea.blogspot.com.....undup.html
    http://mediavidea.blogspot.com.....ggwhy.html

  21. Denver Wang

    December 7th, 2006 at 9:28 pm

    The logo with candel is cool…who made it? Techcrunch ?

    http://www.ezecho.com

  22. SearcH EngineS WeB

    December 7th, 2006 at 9:34 pm

    http://seo-serps.livejournal.com/62503.html :-D

    Here is a tactic for tracing every story on Digg since the beginning submission - and organizing and reviewing every one of the stories by amounts of Diggs they got

  23. James W

    December 7th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

    Digg is cool, but one site would hardly be enough to be called an empire, not bad for a college drop out from Las Vegas

  24. John C

    December 7th, 2006 at 10:08 pm

    How pathetic! Greed + pre-pubescents (Internet, you homo-fucks) = wealth. Well, live in the lime-light, YOU GEEK FUCKS.

  25. Dan Burke

    December 8th, 2006 at 6:54 am

    Digg is great. It has already helped The Darfur Wall project, http://darfurwall.org, gain visibility after just 2 weeks of being live.
    Thanks, Digg.

  26. Adrian Keys

    December 8th, 2006 at 7:03 am

    Yes congrats to Digg!!

    I am just catching up to the goings on on the net after years of being locked away in my career as a Banker.

    I cant express enough how intrigued I am by all new ideas, startups, success stories…really gets the blood boiling.

    http://www.revafinancial.squarespace.com

  27. heather

    December 8th, 2006 at 1:38 pm

    Happy Birthday! xoxoxo-heather

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