On a day when Microsoft announced 5,000 layoffs, the 7 or so people losing their jobs at Digg may seem like a drop in the bucket. But that represents about about 10 percent of Digg’s 75-person workforce, whereas the 5,000 at Microsoft represents 5 percent. We have added Digg to our Layoff Tracker.
This move follows layoffs last October at sister company Revision3, which was also founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson. Adelson writes in a blog post that his goal is to become profitable in 2009, and he is hiring a salesforce to sell ads directly, in addition to trying to make Digg’s advertising partnership with Microsoft more fruitful.
The paring back at Digg comes along during a brutal advertising recession, and flattening growth at the site. In the U.S., Digg attracted 6.8 million unique visitors in December, up only 2 percent since its last peak in July (comScore numbers). Worldwide, the site is doing a little better, with 17.7 million unique visitors in December, up 7 percent from July
Ouch. what a rough day. wish all the best to employees that just got laid off at both digg and microsoft.
http://www.thewebwar.com/digg
Thanks Peter for the lame spam comment
Haahahaa
I don’t know why reading those two comments made me laugh
Hopefully the latest layoffs are as far as it goes for Digg and they can come out of this and keep growing. Love me some Digg ; )
Digg needs to create better revenue streams to monetize their website.
http://kisalt.net/d2
I still do not understand what 75 people are doing at Digg?
Digg could be run by 10-13 people.
What others are doing is beyond me. The CEO is clearly delusional.
The technologies of Digg are quite impressive. They have a large amount of traffic and deal with some challenging problems. I’ve heard Digg staff speak a couple times about their problems and one is experienced engineer shortage. They would like to do so much more but simply need for engineers.
By saying that only 10 people could run Digg is crazy. They need WAY more than 10 engineers just to keep the site up, let alone innovate.
It’s a company so they also need many other people, maybe not 75, thus the cuts today.
Agreed. They need to be cut back to merely 25 people. I bet that most of them earn over $100k per year which probably means nearly $7 Million+ a year in salary alone. All paid for by publishing ads? Is Digg’s business model same as NYT.com? There has to be a way to make money with Digg beyond advertising.
There is a simple/logical way for Digg to make money – sell page 1 article listing at the top of the page – similar to how google sells text ads.
75 people to run Digg is ridiculous – why does it require ‘teams’ of engineers to keep a socially-driven-content site ‘up and running’?
Chexk this out
http://blogs.su...ry/last_day_sun
This is far more than 7 people. But it’s good for investors.
Digg has no reason to exist and is precisely the type of company to get wiped put during downturn.
There are two serious problems at digg:
1. Banner ads are not a good source of revenue
2. They employ way too many people in the first place
I think Digg needs 20-25 people to run the website. Adding a few salespeople will help it’s situation, but advertising budgets are drying up. Digg needs to create better revenue streams to monetize their website.
——>Chris at http://www.schoolshift.com
Quote
“Everything on Digg is user-submitted.”
I guess that´s why they need 75 people working there… filtering, filtering, filtering.
Q: How many people does it take to run a user-submitted news-ranking site?
A: 76. One user to hit “submit”, and 75 people to run screaming in circles trying to figure out the revenue model.
He he, brilliant.
Anyway, I shouldn´t be so hard with them.
I guess 7 M$ shills got axed. Outsourced to India.
Not that we’re at the level yet of a Digg, but we are also much much smaller. It is hard for me to imagine growing our blotter websites to 75 people, and we deal in similar social news/bookmarking markets like Digg. Unfortunately I don’t know how many of Digg’s employees are programmers, sales staff, admin, etc. I don’t see why Digg needs more than a couple dozen people to run the site, and maybe an army of sales folks to actually make it some money since the reports on Microsoft’s efforts are not too favorable.
Your website is ugly. I wish the techcrunch comments weren’t 99% site spam. Why does no one approve comments here? It really is out of control.
What an appropriate comment for a story on Digg. If they want to monetize their suped-up message boards, they might as well figure out what they can sell to SEO guys as that’s all that site is.
Ted McConnell’s comments to Facebook ring true here on Digg as well:
“I have a reaction to Facebook as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?”
Hey Digg, beyond performance-based marketing, how are you going to grow that advertising revenue?
I feel for those that got laid off of Digg because of management’s incorrect expecations. Digg is a single at best; not a home-run….and should have been structured as one.
You seriously comparing your tiny web site to Digg?
http://siteanal....com/?metric=uv
Your site is not even on the internet map.
I don’t think that’s quite what the comment was saying, I don’t think it was a direct comparison to Digg…
“Not that we’re at the level yet of a Digg, …”
You’re being a little harsh in accurate with your comment since the link you posted is for last month and Apple Blotter wasn’t even launched then. Also, it’s kind of hypocritical to say the site’s not even on the map when your own site had less than 200 visitors last month.
Digg has been around for a long time and it still has a large community. I’m not sure they’ll ever become hugely profitable but they will have a happy ending through acquisition in my opinion.
man!.. 7 employees is LITERALLY my whole company!!
Hang in there DIGG!
You lucky bugger – I only have 5! Fire 1 person and that’s 20% of my workforce – not an option.
Digg has some exceptionally bright people running the show. Once they put their minds towards profitability then I’m sure they’ll achieve it quickly.
Digg could run fine with just 1 or 2 people.
And so could Google…wait…
I think most of the web 2.0 companies like Digg, Twitter, Yelp etc. would do just fine with 25 or 30 employees. There’s nothing wrong with that. They could be around for 10 years, but they may always just be small companies that do what they do now and nothing more.
86,4 % of all statistics are made up.
Dang. There are some hattters on here!
“Digg could operate with negative 23 employees!”
rabble rabble rabble
Serves you right, Digg.
I couldn’t care less about Digg until last week when I signed up for an account to check it out. Registration went through and I received the verification email. Clicking on the link gave me an error.
Contacted support and was told my IP address is banned. First time ever using Digg and my IP is banned. I’m probably one of the millions who encountered that problem. Millions of potential visitors.
There goes your revenue. Go dig a hole and bury yourself.
I couldn’t care less about you then and even now.
Ha ha..
ring up your ISP and get a new IP then, or just change it yourself…
You have blatently been doing something dodgey in the passed so changing an IP should be easy if you’ve been digging for $s like many others have been.
Who the hell spells “past” as “passed”? That’s beyond a typo, that’s just plain stupid.
Serves you right, Digg.
I couldn’t care less about Digg until last week when I signed up for an account to check it out. Registration went through and I received the verification email. Clicking on the link gave me an error.
Contacted support and was told my IP address is banned. First time ever using Digg and my IP is banned. I’m probably one of the millions who encountered that problem. Millions of potential visitors.
There goes your revenue. Go dig a hole and bury yourself.
Ha ha..
First Microsoft, then Google’s $ is down, now DIGG is laying off?
@Sean McCann: Blarmy. I know a few highly skilled engineers that have applied there with NO RESPONSE. Not even a “Thanks, we got it.”. Pretty lame practice, regardless of their skill level. Says a lot about a company.
There is a correlation between the announced job cuts and people looking for an app that helps them find a new one – Rise of iJobs at App Store
Man that sucks for those people that they let go. I think Joe Stump let it out via twitter that they let go engineers. Hope they find some work soon.
Now that the economy is where it is, the sell to Yahoo, or sell to Google exit strategy is not there anymore. Profitability through ads on a site like digg is not impossible but that’s a pretty steep road.
Because of Digg’s userbase, it’s not like they can just start doing sponsored positions on their homepage for cash without seeing a major backlash.
Ryan,
The same userbase that would get mad at Digg for giving sponsored positions is the same userbase that is never going to earn Digg money. Digg is a for profit company and needs to start acting like one.
I think this is a good first step. They’re looking at what they need to do to gain profitability, and I’m amazed that they were able to last so long before doing so.
Jim Cramer Talks to Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt about the Skyrocketing Rate of Unemployment and Our Economy and how to create more white collar jobs (video):
http://equedia....and-Our-Economy
What are the leading shopping websites that use the digg.com tagging model?
Ie: Rather then news stories, people tag products all over the web?
http://www.pixe...log.blogger.com
I’m referencing this article in my blog because it seems relevant to the conversation of what the state of social media is right this moment.
Who the hell spells “past” as “passed”? That’s beyond a typo, that’s just plain stupid.