Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

The “digg this” button was already almost extinct

After months, if not years, of speculation, Digg.com has been acquired. A company called Betaworks snapped up the once so popular social community news site for $500,000, it’s been reported. Although the total amount paid by several organizations may have been as high as $16 million.

So what is the future like now for Digg.com? It’s been left in the wake of social networking behemoths like Facebook, and with traffic dwindling, have we seen the last of the “digg this” button?

“Believe it or not, it’s been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we’ve had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments.” So begins the blog post on digg.com announcing the site’s acquisition.

Impressive figures perhaps, but nonetheless, the official Digg button appears on only 14 top sites in the world, and the text “digg this” on 11 sites, according to a quick run through our capture of the Alexa Top 10,000 sites.

In comparison, a whopping 49.3% of the top 10,000 sites in the world have some kind of Facebook integration including links to Facebook. Twitter is not far behind with 41.7%.

But let’s not dwell on the fate of a button.

Digg.com search trend

Using Google Trends for websites, we took a look at what the situation has been like for Digg.com in recent years.

As you can see in the chart below, from early 2009, Digg has seen a steady decline in search interest.

Digg.com traffic trend

When we looked at traffic instead, the decline for Digg was no less dramatic. From a high around mid-2009, with over 1.4 million daily unique visitors, Digg now has just over 250,000 daily unique visitors, according to Google Trends.

Just over the last year alone, Digg’s traffic has fallen by approximately 43%, quickly approaching the 250,000 mark.

According to Quantcast, Digg.com reached 3.8 million people in the US during May 2012. That’s down from 4.8 million at the beginning of the year.

Facebook.com traffic trend

In comparison, Facebook.com has passed 600 million (yes, 600,000,000!) daily unique visitors. With the official toll at 901 million monthly active users as of March this year, the 1 billion-user barrier is not far off, if it’s not been breached already.

Comparing Digg, Facebook, and Twitter

Digg’s traffic is in decline and Facebook is increasing, but you can’t really feel the difference unless you look at them in the same chart. Then it becomes obvious how small Digg’s traffic is, or rather, just how big Facebook is. (We threw in Twitter as well, to make the comparison a bit more interesting.)

Facebook, Digg, och Twitter

What’s the future for Digg?

Even though we’re not sure if there’s much value left in Digg.com, we can’t help but feeling a bit blue over the prospects of it disappearing or being folded into something completely different. It was, after all, the cool place to hangout, especially for geeks.

But looking at the numbers as presented above, it does present a rather gloomy picture of the once so popular site.

What do you think will happen to Digg? Have you given up on the site a long time ago, or are you still hanging around hoping there are better days ahead still?

Betaworks said: “We are going to build Digg for 2012.” Let’s see what happens.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free