THE RISE & FALL & REBIRTH OF DIGG

THE RISE & FALL & REBIRTH OF DIGG

THE RISE & FALL & REBIRTH OF DIGG Guest Blog Post By Sophia Williams   There have been many thousands of websites which have come and gone ever since we were all introduced to the internet, with some casualties more high-profile than others. A prime example would be the social sharing site Digg. Digg was launched back in 2004 and quickly established a reputation as the go-to website for users who wanted to discover and subsequently share, some of the most interesting content around. At the peak, Digg was drawing well over 230 million visitors to the site on an annual basis, but the decline was perhaps as spectacular is its ascent, and just two years from hitting record visitor numbers, it had already hemorrhaged over a third of those visitors. This turned Digg into something that was hotter than the sun and there seemed to be no stopping it, racking up ever-increasing visitor numbers as the success story rolled on and the site just grew bigger and bigger. The infographic listed at the bottom of the article illustrates just how Digg managed to get to the top of the internet tree and what caused it to suffer a spectacular fall from grace. Some commentators seemed to view the decline of Digg with an air of inevitability and predicted that the site would become the first to die from what they termed as social fatigue. The argument goes that Digg ultimately failed the first time around because it became a victim of its own success, growing in popularity to such an extent that it reached a point where individuals...