After not being acquired by Google last year and announcing some cutbacks last week, Digg is rolling up its sleeves and getting to work. The company has hired Tom Shin as its new head of sales from Yahoo, where he was one of the top sales people and head of the Northwest sales region. His job is to build a sales team at Digg go after advertising dollars more directly., something CEO Jay Adelson recently underscored as a big goal of the company in 2009.
Shin will also be in charge of overall advertising strategy and managing the relationship with Microsoft, which serves the bulk of the ads on Digg. At Yahoo, Shin was also a director of product marketing for Yahoo Mail. According to his bio, Yahoo Mail grew from $20 million in revenues to $300 million during his seven-year tenure.
Digg needs all the help it can get. Last year, the company lost an estimated $5 million on revenues of $8.5 million. There are also rumors that Digg is working on an automated, self-serve advertising product that consumers will be able to vote up or down.
It still puzzles me how Digg has so many employees. I mean jesus christ, it doesn’t even make its own content. Sure you need QA ppl, but maybe just a handful.
Agreed. More bloat, IMHO.
Jay seems like a nice guy, but Digg is going from somewhere to nowhere fast. Time for a new CEO.
they barely even had a handful of QA ppl before last week..
ironic, i would guesss the majority of digg users use AdBlock Plus.
The automated self serve ads that you can vote up or down sounds like a great idea. Would like to see that in practice.
Sounds like Digg hired a decent guy to build a sales team. Im sure they will be hitting the phones hard this year. Digg is a No.1 product so sales can’t be that hard, can it???
Actually it sounds like a HORRIBLE idea. Voting up or down for news stories is what makes Digg unique and cool.. noone, noone.. I mean noone is gonna sit there and vote up or down ads.. are u kidding me? That’s just assinine.
And actually selling ads on Digg, I imagine won’t be easy. The ppl who read Digg are tech saavy, and don’t usually respond well to ads.
Agreed, if people start to paying their way to the top, I don’t see how this would generate crowdsource value for Digg’s database…
Digg’s traffic is worth gold compared to some other traffic, like p2p.
how can people vote on them , when most people probably don’t even see them.
Is this poaching, or just hiring? Buried for the shitty title. Wait… wrong site.
People always seem to concentrate on the number of Digg employees and it’s lack of substantial revenue.
Whilst it isn’t making money, neither is Twitter, but both of these services are probably working on more innovative revenue models than traditional PPC/CPM.
As far as it’s head count is concerned, what if they are hiring to work on new features? It would appear here as though they’re adding experience/talent to their existing pool.
Reducing the amount of employees isn’t going to improve their balance sheet. They have to monetize their users and as Adelson has said of late, that’s exactly what they’re focusing on.
I beg to differ.. they’ve had enuff time to try and come up with a monetization strategy.. it’s been more than a couple years already. I also haven’t seen much new in the website either. It’s the same old story. No innovativeness here. Let’s not cut them any slack
Yes they’ve been around for a while and probably should be profitable given their user base but, would you rather they work on an innovative advertising system or plaster their site in ads?
Twitter is similar with their approach, build a community before developing a unique advertising system. I would rather companies, if they have sufficient funding, to focus on the product rather than monetization. If everyone continues to use GoogleAds/traditional advertising, there will be little innovation.
Nice new design by the way guys, very fresh, similar to my own site.
Everything about digg seems forced, kinda like the tech bust companies of the 90’s. They’re forcing themselves to create an income, they should’ve kept it lean rather than be bloated and start panicking at this moment!
CoolestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
This is a joke. Digg user don’t even care about ads. You think they will sit around voting up and down on them? LMAO.
Wow, must be nice having endless sacks of cash lying around!
RT
http://www.total-privacy.us.tc
um…Digg sucks. That’s a problem some smiley salesguy from yahoo is not going to fix.
Digg.
It’s how you spell “fart” on the internets.
digg always digging…..
I used to work with this dude and i cannot believe this is news.
This guy’s resume sounds pretty impressive. I think he’ll be great for Digg. They need him! Let’s hope he can do for Digg what he did for Yahoo!
“Yahoo Mail grew from $20 million in revenues to $300 million during his seven-year tenure.”
Riiiiiiiigh. It happened under my and about 10,00 other Yahoos’ “tenure” too!
He headed it all up, so can lay claim to that stat – if it’s correct that is, sounds a very high increase to me.
Lolz, no he didn’t. WTF are you talking about.
Lolz, no he didn’t. WTF are you talking about.
He was an AD REP for all practical purposes during the bulk of his “tenure”
the biggest problem digg has with ads is that a huge base of their users block them.
google it.
they’ve got to get around this. digging ‘ads’ makes them content and justifies a higher cpm and may get around some of the blocking services.
If all General Managers who “owned P&Ls” and all sales people (category VPs, Regional VPs, etc) and all BD’ers at Yahoo! actually were responsible for the revenue growth they claim, Yahoo! would be doing ~$15-$20 billion in revenue for 2009
Who cares what he did at Yahoo? Check out his picture, he’s a hottie!
I foresee big great changes for digg~~~~~~
how was he ‘poached” exactly..?
oh and what a stud! i “digg” him………!
lol @ people “digg”ing him
this guy is so hot it hurts!