The wildly popular tech site, where stories get approved or dumped based on the views of the userbase, plans to branch out into other categories and formats.
Digg has been touted as the new Slashdot, and no wonder. To get a peek at the hottest upcoming story on Slashdot, one has to be a subscriber. Or, one can just follow Digg and most likely see it there first.
MediaPost reported that Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson wants to get digging on more news categories besides technology. Business and sports news look likely, as Adelson said in the article the Digg userbase has hit “critical mass” to sustain such forays.
“Critical mass” might be an apt way to describe how Digg works. Users register with the site and submit stories. Other user vote on them; a Digg is a positive vote, and enough Diggs gets the story promoted to the front page. From there, even more people see the story and visit the site hosting it.
That’s been a boon to many sites, and a burden to others. A site that gets overloaded with Digg traffic can grind to a halt if its servers aren’t up to the load-balancing needed to handle the influx.
Now that Digg is ready to grow, Adelson will put some of eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar’s $2.8 million in venture capital to work:
Adelson said the venture money will be mostly used to upgrade Digg.com’s server capacity, which is rapidly approaching being overwhelmed by traffic. “Just scaling the growth that we’re having right now is enough to justify some investment,” he said. “I think, though, when you consider that the critical mass that we’ve built just around technology news is growing at this rate–yes, we’re going to need that capital to be able to handle that capacity.”
One important point Adelson made about Digg is how the site was profitable even before getting an infusion of venture capital. Google AdSense, displayed throughout Digg.com, made that possible.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
