Digg, a social bookmarking site which launched on December 5th 2004 and at its peak attracted 236 million visitors annually. Which made it one of the largest online hubs of its time. However, in 2010 Digg fell victim to a mass migration from one hub to another smaller more communal hub, Reddit.
Reddit, who now label themselves as the ‘front page of the internet’, reportedly reached 250 million page views in January 2010 which grew to 829 million in December 2010 and achieved 37 billion page views in the whole of 2012. Diggs numbers for July 2010 were 36 million visitors down hitting 200 million page views and indicating that it was on a steady decline.
After this decline many people were saying that Digg became a glorified RSS reader who should never had forced people to login with Facebook in their version 4.0. Others say it was the change in their advertising strategy that sparked the mass migration. The standard functionality of both sites are very similar, both use a text based layout and voting system which marketers love. However, Reddit has integrated their own quirks such as /r/IAMA where celebrities can conduct online interviews which attracts some big celebrities, proving great for their PR. Notable people who have conducted an ‘AMA’ include Barack Obama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Gates, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Snoop Lion to name just a few of the top posts of this year.
Digg, one of the largest online hubs in the late 2000’s, was sold for $500,000 in July 2012 to Betaworks after being previously valued at approximately $200 million. LinkedIn paid $4 million for Digg patents and the Washington Post paid $12 million for the Digg team.
Reddit grew 230% in 2010 at Diggs expense as indicated by the image below:
Our prediction is that in the future the team behind Reddit will make a mistake much like Digg which will spark another mass migration. To which website the users will flock to is almost unpredictable as I don’t see the Reddit team making any huge mistakes within the next few years. As we all know the Internet will be a massively different world in a few years than it is today. Who knows, the Internet conglomerate that is Google may purchase Reddit and integrate their own ideas to prevent an audience change.
This sort of user behaviour is uncommon especially when we’re talking in terms of network science. However, it is the most logical solution to something like this as network science rules predict that people will more likely migrate to another large hub instead of many different smaller hubs. This can be seen in this instance as Reddit has blown up whereas smaller sites such as Buzzfeed, StumbleUpon, Delicious and Pinterest havn’t seen as much of an impact.