Venture Capitalists Invest $2.8M in Digg
My favorite social bookmarking and technology news website, Digg, is about to get a whole lot better. This is because some big names have invested 2.8 million dollars into Digg, which has been rapidly growing since its inception. Investors included the co-founder of eBay and Netscape. I hope this means that they will have the money get more servers as Digg has been fairly slow recently. This is fantastic news. You can read the article here and the Digg for the article here.
Here’s what one of the Digg founders and former TechTV show host, Kevin Rose had to say in regards to questions raised:
The biggest problem we have faced so far is keeping up with growth. This gives us some money to buy more servers (just ordered 12) and hire a few more developers to help Owen out. Once we get rolling, expect to see new features more often.
And don’t worry, we still control the company. This wasn’t some kind of crazy takeover, just an investment by some cool folks that believe in the digg community.
..and no guys - I don’t get the money, it goes to the company to help us grow :P
There will be no crazy ads all over the place, all decisions involving the site we control. While it may seem like a lot of money, once you hire a DBA, 3-4 developers, QA guy, designer, get a small office, and plan on buying over 100 servers in the next 6 months - it works out.
This will ensure that digg will continue to keep up with growth and add new features. I have a list of 20 features Owen is starting to work on. If you like digg now, wait till you see the stuff we have planned..
I saw your comment here: http://www.lifehacker.com/software/feature/geekette-getting-started-with-digg-134206.php and was a bit confused. How have you been a member of Digg for 3 years when it has only been working for less than a year. Typo? ;) Great blog you have here.
Digg v2 has only been up for less than a year…. the original Digg has been active for several years. Digg v1 was a different beast altogether. No fancy numbers for people that digg stories, just a huge list of people.
“© 2004-2005 digg - all rights reserved”
I joined digg.com the day Kevin released it and posted about it on his blog, back on December 3rd, 2004. That was version 1, and I remember it clearly as you describe, with a gray background and simple list of categories on the right. Digg v2 was released July 2005 ( http://digg.com/digg_news/Welcome_to_digg_2.0 ) and SilverOrange, the designers, didn’t even get around to posting about it on their site till September 22nd. ( http://www.silverorange.com/a/news/digg ). You can see the earliest posts by the developer of Digg as well. ( http://digg.com/digg_news/page3 )
I’m a diehard fan and user of Digg, and I think your blog is great, but I am still a bit confused about your insistance that it has been up for several years. I welcome a tough reply. ;)
I’m trying to research where I read that Digg has been online for 5 years, or at least registered for that long. I’ve been using Digg for years, maybe not 3 years, but as far as I can remember. You got me pinned. ;-)
http://www.whois.net/whois.cgi2?d=digg.com
It has indeed been registered for 5 years, but they bought the domain from the original owner. More info on this podcast. ( http://techphile.ca/?q=node/61 )
It’s been fun. :)
nice. it’ll be interesting to see what improvements are made to Digg. :D
i just hope that people don’t keep posting stupid stuff… :x
Agreed!
I’m just wondering what’s in it for investors. Does all of Digg’s revenue come from advertising revenue? If so, is this profitable enough to invest 2.8 million and expect a reasonable return? Is there a bigger, better plan of turning it into a subscription based service of some sort one day. I just don’t get it.