Archive for May, 2010
Lightweight models and cost-effective scalability (Digg)
Digg is a social news website combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS and allows people to discover and share contents on the web based on its categories such as Technologies, World & Business and etc. Shared contents can be reviewed and voted by people either by “digging” (vote up) and “burying” (vote down, allow users to prevent spamming and bad links), and the most “Dug” contents will get to appear on the front page to shared with millions of people on the web. Digg was ranked 119 by Alexa.com as of May 11, 2010.
Digg has fully utilises the concept of harnessing collective intelligence, where its users are the one contributing information by sharing articles and videos on the web, which means Digg has never spent any cost on advertising. There are only total of 77 employees working for Digg and according to compete.com analytical results shows that Digg currently has 115 million visits during March, 2010.
According to the interview between Gadgetell and Digg’s founder Kevin Rose:
“Digg started in September 2004 as a personal project. It was a social experiment in how masses of users could control and promote content without the external editorial control. After a very short time, we realized that we were on to something, as digg was becoming a great resource for breaking news stories, sometimes even before traditional media. Today digg has more than 140,000 registered users – a figure that is doubling every three months—and more than 500,000 unique visitors every day.”
Digg portrays the pattern of lightweight models and cost-effective scalability, since it only started off with small amount of employees but serving a large amounts of visits which is a result of network effects, where Digg started off with a single hosted server ($99 per moth with $99 set up fee), free open source software (LAMP site with Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and outsourced to low cost developer from Elance. This business model provides low cost economics on the supply side to allow greater flexibility in scaling the technology, marketing and staff. Digg’s business revenue model based on advertising where Digg provides traffics into these advertised websites and also promoting the pattern of leveraging the long tail, reaching to the niche markets.
It is hilarious to found out that according to Kevin Rose, he noticed that Digg got famous was due to the Paris Hilton cellphone incident during year 2005. He admitted that there’s a user close to the hacker submitted the story to Digg, and the story was quickly “dugg” to the homepage and eventually Google and Yahoo! both indexed Digg and gave them the top position for the keywords “Paris Hilton Hack”. With such events take place, with enormous traffics coming in while Digg was only running at one web server at that time, who wouldn’t notice? 
Digg also provides a tour on how to enjoy your stay at Digg.com.
Below are videos related to Digg:
Since it’s a long video, I suggest to watch from 0:20 – 3:59 to know more how Digg started and offered made to purchase Digg:
Kevin Rose showing how to use Digg on the show “The Screen Savers” aired December 13, 2004. (He was the host for that show yet he didn’t boast and tell people that he owns Digg!):
Hilarious explanation of Digg.com by Wallstrip:
So, what are you guys waiting for? Let’s Digg!
(By the way, you can login to Digg with its new feature of Facebook access login without registering an account again. Easy.)
References:
Digg Official Website http://digg.com/
Digg Tour http://about.digg.com/tour/1
Alexa http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com
Gadgetell http://www.gadgetell.com/tech/comment/gadgetell-exclusive-interview-with-diggs-kevin-rose/
TechCrunch Interview With Digg’s Kevin Rose http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J1T3Y70IW4
Kevin Rose shows off digg.com on The Screen Savers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
Wallstrip – DiGG.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhI15TOJLnM
Leveraging the Long Tail (Play-Asia)
Play-Asia is a popular online retailer for entertainment products from Asia. Established in 2002, the website sells video games, movie DVDs, music, CDs, gadgets, books, gaming console accessories and toys. Play-Asia is based in Hong Kong, and focuses on the Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific region, but also offers most of the products for international shipping to all around the world.
Play-Asia sells products to the smaller niche market of retired gaming platforms such as the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 which gives the company a competitive advantage. The majority of large retailers on the Internet have chosen to discontinue these retired products but Play-Asia continue to sell these products which results Play-Asia’s distribution more feasible and able to bring in potential profit from its consumers. Play-Asia sells over 100,000 different products and has leveraged the long tail, by target and capture new micro-markets of a wider audience who are interested in wide range of video games, movie, music, toys and etc.
Play-Asia also uses algorithmic data management to match the supply and demand of its audience, by helping its customer to find products of similar interest with columns such as ”related items” and “discounted items”. This feature enables Play-Asia to increase its sales through better matching results to user interests.
Play-Asia utilizes the philosophy of “Wisdom of crowds”, by allowing users to provide comments on the product they purchased which eventually results in determining the product’s popularity rankings and reviews. Play-Asia has successfully leveraged customer self-service to increase customer satisfaction, by putting customers in control through the “My Account” page and able to view order tracking with arrival estimates, returns and lifetime order history.
Play-Asia also provide their service and information through the use of:
Play-Asia has used the architecture of improved search, filtering and aggregation to provide effective search functions for its customer to view and purchase their desired product. Play-Asia provides the opportunity for its customer to purchase “rare” products that are hardly found on the market, and also provides an Affiliate Program where customer can refer other people to the site and earn commission from there to attract potential partners.
Since Play-Asia is a web platform business based on the Web 2.0, the future of Play-Asia would be relied on how will the Web 2.0 concepts evolve and how Play-Asia can take the advantages of that to improve its service and continue leveraging the long tail.
References:
Play-Asia Website http://www.play-asia.com/. Accessed 01 May 2010.
