Rand said about either he and/or Danny Sullivan wanting to do a Digg Clone for Search. I guess I have to ask, “WTF?” (That’s a “why” in there…)
Digg is an awesome story. It’s fun to play with for everyone. It loses money. That’s right. The coolest news and social media concept going can’t turn a profit and they couldn’t sell it for the crazy valuation YouTube got.
So, I ask you again the same thing I’ve often thought about when I wanted to do a Digg Clone for a dozen or so verticals that don’t get any traction on Digg…”Why the…!?!”
People that use Digg are smarter than the average bear. They are anti-advertising. They chew up bandwidth and server resources all day long. Does this sound like a good market?
The only way I think it makes any sense to run your own Digg Clone vertical is to append it to a site that already turns a profit. It has to be a user feature rather than the whole show. Kind of like Site Search. Let it build you links and mindshare so you can hock your other doo-dads.
I’m betting 99% of the standalone Digg Clones out there will be gone in 18 months. But I also bet 99% of the sites that treat it as a component see an accretive benefit.
I could be wrong, though.
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Good post, I agree totally about the users. Its doesn’t make sense unless you want to foot the bill yourself.
I agree with your post. Not to mention as all the digg clones pop up, the novelty of social media starts to wear off and the market will become over saturated making it even harder to turn a profit with a mee too site.
With that said social media is pretty cool and I hope digg can fiture out a way to turn a good profit so they’ll persist long into the future, because Google Social Media is coming (maybe in the form of Googl reader??.)
I’m trying to be one of the 1% Digg clones that succeeds. with SEOyak.com I have targeted the SEO community because I think that they are tech savvy, and Digg seems to be antagonizing the SEO community right now. Of course, if Danny or Rand decide to start something similar, It would be some very difficult competition for the site.
I think you are right about the problems trying to monetize a site like this. As you said Digg users are general anti-advertising, and the webmaster crowd never clicks on ads. For now I’m not advertising, and I’ll figure out the monetization if I ever get to a half decent amount of traffic.