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