Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? So, just last Friday, we published a
Speaker 1: tech Stuff classic episode called the Dig Story, and I
Speaker 1: was thinking, I should probably do a very quick update
Speaker 1: on what's been going on with Dig since twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: except you know me, I don't do quick updates because
Speaker 1: I'm a chatty Cathy. So we're gonna do that. We're
Speaker 1: gonna do an update on what's been happening with Dig
Speaker 1: since twenty seventeen. But first I want to go back
Speaker 1: and talk over kind of what happened with Dig in
Speaker 1: the first place, just in case you didn't listen to
Speaker 1: the original episode or the classic that published on Friday,
Speaker 1: so that you're not totally in the dark. So Dig
Speaker 1: originally law lunched in late two thousand and four, and
Speaker 1: it was essentially a news aggregator site. Dig started off
Speaker 1: as a site where users, the visitors, the members of
Speaker 1: DIG would be able to share links to stuff that
Speaker 1: they thought was useful or cool or entertaining or you
Speaker 1: know whatever, and It was a site that was all
Speaker 1: about discovery and sharing discovery. So search engines are great, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you are looking for something specific, then you can
Speaker 1: go to a search engine and you can find a
Speaker 1: link to something that answers your specific question. That's fantastic.
Speaker 1: But what if you're just in the mood to you know,
Speaker 1: browse and to see what's going on specifically, like what's
Speaker 1: what's more important right now today? What is happening? What
Speaker 1: if you didn't really know what you wanted to see
Speaker 1: or read, you just knew that you wanted something, Then
Speaker 1: a site like dig or Reddit, which launched not long
Speaker 1: after Dig did and was Dig's big competitor, a site
Speaker 1: like that could be a huge help. So Dig really
Speaker 1: focused on the recent and the timely. They really were
Speaker 1: hyper focused on things like tech and gaming and sports
Speaker 1: and news, that kind of stuff like that was really
Speaker 1: where they were focusing. Sharing a link on Dig then
Speaker 1: gave the entire community the opportunity to weigh in on
Speaker 1: whether they thought that particular story was important or not.
Speaker 1: So if folks thought it was interesting or important and
Speaker 1: they had a Dig account, they could boost the story
Speaker 1: up the page ranking. This was called digging, an article,
Speaker 1: and if an article received enough digs, it would get
Speaker 1: promoted to the front page of Dig, which in turn
Speaker 1: was being called the front page of the Internet. If
Speaker 1: the community thought the story was lame or that, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe it was already represented within Dig, whatever that might be,
Speaker 1: you could vote it down. This was called burying an article.
Speaker 1: The philosophy behind Dig was that the community determined what
Speaker 1: stuff on the Internet was actually worth looking at. It
Speaker 1: was giving power to the people. Now, none of that
Speaker 1: would matter unless people actually used Dig. If it had
Speaker 1: never attracted users, then it just would have been a
Speaker 1: curiosity and nothing more. But it actually did attract quite
Speaker 1: a few users. People began to flock to the site
Speaker 1: and use it a lot, so their participation would ultimately
Speaker 1: end up having a larger impact on the web in general.
Speaker 1: Because if you had a piece that showed up on
Speaker 1: Dig's front page, that could mean a significant boost traffic
Speaker 1: as people checked out, you know, they click on the
Speaker 1: article and go to your site. So Dig could end
Speaker 1: up being really influential. There was this thing called the
Speaker 1: Dig effect that was a big deal when Dig was,
Speaker 1: you know, in its heyday, but just a couple of
Speaker 1: years after launching the site, one of the co founders,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose, who was a personality really at that time.
Speaker 1: He was on tech TV and had a show, a
Speaker 1: podcast that he launched called Dignation The Pretty Famous Dude.
Speaker 1: He started to encounter a frustrating experience because there were
Speaker 1: some companies that were interested in purchasing Dig, and Rose
Speaker 1: was like, yeah, I don't mind the idea of selling
Speaker 1: it because he really liked creating stuff and getting it going.
Speaker 1: But he was less interested in just sticking around forever. Right,
Speaker 1: He liked the creative process. But he couldn't just sell
Speaker 1: Dig and then move on to something else because Dig
Speaker 1: had a board of directors who ultimately had the authority
Speaker 1: of that decision about whether or not to sell a company,
Speaker 1: and the board was convinced that the incoming offers, such
Speaker 1: as one from news Corp. News Corps, which had famously
Speaker 1: purchased MySpace, just undervalued the company. So news Corp's offer
Speaker 1: was said to be somewhere around sixty million dollars, but
Speaker 1: the board director said, no, that's way too low. We
Speaker 1: need to have a much higher offer before we will
Speaker 1: consider selling. So Rose couldn't sell to news Corp. He
Speaker 1: just had to sort of sit back and continue working
Speaker 1: on the site. Reportedly, he became less interested in doing
Speaker 1: that over his time at DIG, so he thought it
Speaker 1: would have been better to cash out and created a
Speaker 1: new project, but he was beholden to the board. By
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, there was a much larger deal
Speaker 1: that was in the works between Dig and Google. Now,
Speaker 1: the rumor was that Google offered to acquire Dig for
Speaker 1: the princely sum of two hundred million dollars, so it
Speaker 1: looked like maybe the Bard directors had been right right,
Speaker 1: like they had said sixty millions too low, and then
Speaker 1: a couple of years later the offer's two hundred million. However,
Speaker 1: that deal never actually happened. Negotiations fell apart for one
Speaker 1: reason or another, perhaps a whole bunch of different reasons,
Speaker 1: and Google did not go through with the deal. In
Speaker 1: twenty ten, Dig tackled an ambitious and drastic redesign known
Speaker 1: as DIG Version four. Reportedly, Kevin Rose made a huge
Speaker 1: number of changes as part of a venture capital funding round,
Speaker 1: and upon launch, this rollout was a disaster. The redesign
Speaker 1: went from the very foundation of how Dig worked, like
Speaker 1: even the actual technology that powered everything was changed, and
Speaker 1: the changes went all the way through to user interface
Speaker 1: and experience, and it turned out that not only did
Speaker 1: it get rid of a lot of stuff that DIG
Speaker 1: users valued, it was not ready for deployment when it
Speaker 1: went live because people started to encounter frustrating glitches while
Speaker 1: interacting with the new design. The whole website would crash
Speaker 1: repeatedly throughout the day when the site was working, which
Speaker 1: was never a guarantee. Users were very upset to see
Speaker 1: historic features just missing from the experience, so, for example,
Speaker 1: the option to bury a post was gone. Perhaps more
Speaker 1: upsetting was the fact that this new version of dig
Speaker 1: would allow news sites to automatically submit articles to DIG,
Speaker 1: so instead of everything being user generated and user submitted,
Speaker 1: now the news agencies could actually submit stuff themselves directly
Speaker 1: to dig. It no longer was in the community's hands.
Speaker 1: There was also a lot of complaints, although I never
Speaker 1: found like any real strong corroborating evidence, but there were
Speaker 1: a lot of complaints that some power users at DIG
Speaker 1: had a disproportionate amount of control of what could be
Speaker 1: seen and what would not make it to the front page,
Speaker 1: and that meant the community as a whole found itself
Speaker 1: unable to really get stuff seen on the main page,
Speaker 1: so it was very disheartening. Alexis Ohanian, one of the
Speaker 1: co founders of Reddit, you know, the big competitor to Dig,
Speaker 1: actually published an open letter to Kevin Rose saying that
Speaker 1: the new features in version four suggested that the team
Speaker 1: had allowed investors to really weigh in on what should
Speaker 1: and should not be part of the platform, and that
Speaker 1: rather than listening to the community and responding to what
Speaker 1: the community wanted, the site was listening to the money,
Speaker 1: and that that in turn was alienating Dig's users. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that, you know, a lot of what
Speaker 1: he was saying was right, because a ton of Dig
Speaker 1: users abandoned Dig. Many of them actually migrated on over
Speaker 1: to Reddit. But that's another story, because Reddit itself has
Speaker 1: had its own ups and downs, including a very tumultuous
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. Anyway, the various co founders of Dig
Speaker 1: started to leave the company over time. By twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: Kevin Rose was bouncing from the company as well. Lots
Speaker 1: of users had Traffic was dr being precipitously. It was bad. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were also growing rapidly
Speaker 1: and taking over some of the functions that Dig had
Speaker 1: performed because now folks could create a profile on a
Speaker 1: system that prioritized communities and networks, at least that's what
Speaker 1: they claimed to do. Then they could share stuff with
Speaker 1: their friends on these platforms, So it was social first
Speaker 1: and then content second. Kind of approach you could argue
Speaker 1: Dig was maybe you know, content and social together, or
Speaker 1: maybe even content first, social second. But the point is
Speaker 1: Dig was seeing other sites drink its milkshake. On top
Speaker 1: of all that, other companies were poaching talent from Dig.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post company hired more than a dozen of
Speaker 1: digs site engineers, for example, so it was pretty clear
Speaker 1: Dig was on borrow time. In twenty twelve, Dig would
Speaker 1: kind of of get sold for parts. Different parts of
Speaker 1: Dig were sold off to other companies, but the site
Speaker 1: itself and the underlying tech and the ip of what
Speaker 1: made dig dig ended up going to a company called
Speaker 1: Beta Works, and the price tag had dropped from that
Speaker 1: theoretical high of two hundred million dollars with Google to
Speaker 1: a much less grandiose half million. Don't get me wrong,
Speaker 1: half a million dollars is a lot of money, It
Speaker 1: just doesn't measure up to some of the earlier offers.
Speaker 1: DIG had turned away in its history. I should also
Speaker 1: add there's some dispute about that five hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: sales price. That's what everyone reported, just about everyone anyway,
Speaker 1: but tech crunches Frederick Lardinois reported that the actual deal
Speaker 1: was considerably larger and included not just cash but also
Speaker 1: equity in the company, and so the value was much
Speaker 1: higher than what reports had suggested. In that same article,
Speaker 1: he pointed out that Dig's annual ad revenue was likely
Speaker 1: more than half a million dollars a year, so it
Speaker 1: wouldn't really make sense to sell the company for half
Speaker 1: a million dollars. But then again, Vox dot com reported
Speaker 1: that Dig ran its entire service off of servers that
Speaker 1: were on premises. You know, it wasn't a cloud based
Speaker 1: company at that point, so it was really before cloud
Speaker 1: competing had made it less expensive to run huge websites. Like,
Speaker 1: if your website had a fairly modest user base, then
Speaker 1: you probably wouldn't be seeing enormous bills per month. But
Speaker 1: for Dig, because of how popular it was, Vox estimated
Speaker 1: that it would cost a quarter million dollars a month
Speaker 1: just to keep the site running. So then you're like, well,
Speaker 1: even if your your revenue is more than half a
Speaker 1: million dollars, If your monthly costs are two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars, you're in trouble unless you're making significantly
Speaker 1: more than half a million dollars a year. But whatever
Speaker 1: the scope of the deal, however much it ended up
Speaker 1: being under Beta Works, DIG would relaunch in the summer
Speaker 1: of twenty twelve with an entirely different approach to content.
Speaker 1: So instead of having users determine what material would make
Speaker 1: up the front page, DIG featured an editorially curated front page. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, DIG determined what went on Dig, not
Speaker 1: users that were still like scoring systems in place and
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, but the fundamental operation of DIG
Speaker 1: had totally transformed. Now that's pretty much where I left
Speaker 1: off in that twenty seventeen episode. At that time, DIG
Speaker 1: was still under the ownership of Beta Works, the company.
Speaker 1: Beta Works typically focuses on startups that are at the
Speaker 1: earliest stages of development. So Beta Works looks out for
Speaker 1: interesting projects and then provides what's called seed stage funding,
Speaker 1: which is the initial money that a startup needs in
Speaker 1: order to kind of coalesce from an idea into something real.
Speaker 1: Seed money helped startups do things like attract the right
Speaker 1: talent and put together the earliest plans for how the
Speaker 1: company will actually operate. To take over Dig was a
Speaker 1: little bit outside the wheelhouse for that kind of company, though,
Speaker 1: as I understand it, Beta Works mary Dig with a
Speaker 1: socially driven news web app it had in development called
Speaker 1: news dot Me. One thing Beta Works did have under
Speaker 1: its belt was the service bit dot l y, the
Speaker 1: URL shortener. That's another episode. It also helped develop tweet Deck,
Speaker 1: which Twitter would ultimately purchase, but again that's a matter
Speaker 1: for another episode. The heyday of Dig was over at
Speaker 1: this point, and finding news articles and stuff from the
Speaker 1: Beta Works era of Dig isn't that easy because people
Speaker 1: had moved on. Reddit absorbed a ton of digs community,
Speaker 1: and the new Dig was largely viewed as just another
Speaker 1: web based news site. So really, in that stretch between
Speaker 1: twenty twelve and two eighteen, there aren't that many news
Speaker 1: items about Dig. But then things would change. I'll explain
Speaker 1: more after we take this quick break. Okay, So, like
Speaker 1: I said before the break, between twenty twelve and twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: you didn't see that many news stories about Dig. It
Speaker 1: just seemed to be performing like a basic web page
Speaker 1: that had news items on it, most of which were
Speaker 1: either written by an internal editorial team or were connecting
Speaker 1: to external news sources. So the next big bit of
Speaker 1: Dig's history that I have to share happened. In early
Speaker 1: spring twenty eighteen, Dig announced that it was shutting down
Speaker 1: it's OURSS reader tool. So for those of y'all who
Speaker 1: are not familiar with RSS, it stayed for really Simple Syndication,
Speaker 1: or maybe it stands for RDF Site Summary. RDF in
Speaker 1: turn stands for Resource Description Framework. There's actually disagreement on
Speaker 1: what RSS stands for, but really the initialism doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: RSS allows for the distribution of web updates or Internet
Speaker 1: content in general to lots of other stuff. So what
Speaker 1: does that actually mean? Well, let's take an example with podcasts.
Speaker 1: How does your podcast app, whichever one you use, how
Speaker 1: does it know when there is a new episode of
Speaker 1: the shows that you subscribe to. Well, podcasts published to
Speaker 1: a platform, and each podcast has an RSS feed associated
Speaker 1: with it, your podcatching service checks for updates to the
Speaker 1: various RSS feeds out there all the shows that you
Speaker 1: subscribe to. So let's say that you subscribe to tech stuff,
Speaker 1: it does a check to see is there a new
Speaker 1: tech stuff episode? If there has not been an update
Speaker 1: since the last time it did this check, nothing changes you,
Speaker 1: no notifications, nothing like that. If when it checks the
Speaker 1: RSS link and it finds an update, finds out there's
Speaker 1: been a new episode added to the feed, your podcasting
Speaker 1: app will say, Hey, there's a brand new episode of
Speaker 1: that show you like, so you can listen to it
Speaker 1: whenever you like. RSS tech led to the development of
Speaker 1: RSS readers, So these tools let you subscribe to various
Speaker 1: sources and you can view updates to those websites within
Speaker 1: the reader itself. So instead of physically navigating to like
Speaker 1: a dozen different websites that you like in order to
Speaker 1: just see if anything's new. Let's say that you know
Speaker 1: you typically visit four different news sites, a couple of
Speaker 1: gaming sites. Maybe you visit I don't know, let's say
Speaker 1: it's a financial site and you do all these and
Speaker 1: those are typically the ones you go to. Instead of
Speaker 1: going to each of those individually and looking to see
Speaker 1: if there are any updates, you could use an RSS
Speaker 1: reader that would just list out in chronological order reverse
Speaker 1: chronological order, typically what the latest headlines are from the
Speaker 1: various sources, and they would usually let you organize these
Speaker 1: in various ways, so you could put all of your
Speaker 1: sports relaid stuff in one place, you know, all of
Speaker 1: your gaming stuff in another place, et cetera, and you
Speaker 1: could just go through and look for headlines that caught
Speaker 1: your interest. And you don't have to go to each
Speaker 1: website individually just to see what the updates are. You
Speaker 1: consolidate everything into a single view. It's incredibly useful. But
Speaker 1: by twenty eighteen, the glory of the RSS reader days
Speaker 1: was well in the past. A lot of companies that
Speaker 1: had previously offered RSS readers had since shut them down.
Speaker 1: For instance, Google shut down Google Reader way back in
Speaker 1: twenty thirty. There are still folks out there today, a
Speaker 1: decade later who are sore about that. I'm one of them. Honestly,
Speaker 1: RSS readers really made it useful to get a quick
Speaker 1: look at news, and there still are some out there.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say that they don't exist anymore,
Speaker 1: but some of the biggest ones have long since gone away. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Dig had maintained its own RSS reader tool, and it
Speaker 1: was fittingly enough called dig Reader, but in March twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: Dig announced that the feature would end on March twenty sixth.
Speaker 1: Molly Mchughotharinger dot com posted a full article about this
Speaker 1: and lamented the fact that it was the latest in
Speaker 1: a long string of setbacks for people who just wanted
Speaker 1: to be able to view web updates chronologically or reverse chronologically.
Speaker 1: MCEU pointed out that a lot of platforms were leaning
Speaker 1: harder and harder on algorithms to determine what a user
Speaker 1: would actually see, and that these algorithms valued engagement and
Speaker 1: sharing over quality. This internment, we were getting a lot
Speaker 1: more junk, fake stuff, and misinformation put in front of us,
Speaker 1: things that would grab our attention but not necessarily reflect reality.
Speaker 1: That probably sounds familiar, right because we we've been talking
Speaker 1: about that for a couple of years a lot, But
Speaker 1: this was way back in twenty eighteen. It just hasn't
Speaker 1: gotten any better. MCEW expressed sadness that yet another RSS
Speaker 1: reader was going the way of the DODO, because it
Speaker 1: marked another example of how it was growing increasingly hard
Speaker 1: for an individual to curate their own web experience. Instead,
Speaker 1: the various platforms out there, particularly social networks, were taking
Speaker 1: over that task for us and dictating to us what
Speaker 1: we would see as opposed to letting us say, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm really just interested in reading information from these sources
Speaker 1: because I feel those sources are really reliable, so I
Speaker 1: just want to see those Those options were going away anyway.
Speaker 1: Just one month later after they shut down dig Reader,
Speaker 1: even bigger news came out of dig. Beta Works sold
Speaker 1: off a majority steak in DIG to another company called
Speaker 1: buy sell Ads. It would not be a total acquisition.
Speaker 1: Beta Works CEO John Borthwick indicated that Dig's previous shareholders,
Speaker 1: including Beta Works itself, would retain some steak in DIG.
Speaker 1: The actual details of the deal remained private. So to
Speaker 1: this day, I have no clue how much buy sell
Speaker 1: Ads spent in order to get a majority steak. I
Speaker 1: don't even know what level that majority steak is, right,
Speaker 1: I don't know what percentage of dig i sell ads owns,
Speaker 1: but what the heck is buy sell Ads. That all
Speaker 1: started with a guy named Todd Garland. He got his
Speaker 1: start as a web designer, and he found that the
Speaker 1: part he liked the least about creating web pages or
Speaker 1: administering web pages was the whole process of securing ads
Speaker 1: for web pages to help generate revenue. He found that
Speaker 1: entire process to be slow and frustrating and overly complicated,
Speaker 1: and he thought, what if you could build some software
Speaker 1: to automate as much of that process as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: to make it faster and simpler for the end users.
Speaker 1: What if you could remove all those hurdles that typically
Speaker 1: exist and through software, just make it a much less
Speaker 1: painful experience. To that end, he built buy sell ads
Speaker 1: so that from say a web page standpoint, a publisher standpoint,
Speaker 1: a web admin wouldn't have to do anything other than
Speaker 1: perhaps set a rate, you know, say like, all right,
Speaker 1: this is how much I will charge an advertiser to
Speaker 1: make use of the real estate on my web page.
Speaker 1: And then that person would just wait to see which
Speaker 1: ad requests get sent to them through this service and
Speaker 1: then approve or deny from there, and that would get
Speaker 1: things going. On the advertiser side. All they had to
Speaker 1: do was determine if the ad rate made sense, Like
Speaker 1: if they said, well, does it make sense for us
Speaker 1: to pay this much? Are we going to get enough
Speaker 1: traffic for that to be a good investment? And if so,
Speaker 1: then they could say, all right, well we will. We're
Speaker 1: interested in including this particular publisher as part of our
Speaker 1: ad campaign, and that would be it. At least that
Speaker 1: was the idea. I'll come back to buy sell ads
Speaker 1: because the reputation of that company is a little up
Speaker 1: in the air as far as I can tell, although
Speaker 1: from extremely limited information, so keep all that in mind.
Speaker 1: At any rate, Buy sell ads seemed like it was
Speaker 1: an odd fit to purchase a majority share in an
Speaker 1: online media company, But then you could also argue that
Speaker 1: Beta Works was a weird fit, and Beta Works had
Speaker 1: done it way back in twenty twelve. However, when you
Speaker 1: really start to think about it, I argue the buy
Speaker 1: sell ads acquisition makes a little more sense because an
Speaker 1: ad company does serve two sets of customers. Right. You've
Speaker 1: got your advertisers, who want to get ads in front
Speaker 1: of people, preferably people who are more likely going to
Speaker 1: act on the ad than otherwise. And then you've got
Speaker 1: your publishers, the people who have real estate to offer
Speaker 1: that they want to monetize on their sites or to
Speaker 1: generate revenue. A company like buy sell ads has to
Speaker 1: satisfy both groups, right. They have to satisfy both the
Speaker 1: advertisers and the publishers, and by gaining majority ownership of
Speaker 1: a publisher, because that's what dig is at this point.
Speaker 1: It's a publisher. It's not an aggregator anymore, not really. Well,
Speaker 1: that means that buy sell ads now has a platform
Speaker 1: where it can actively test out new strategies. It can
Speaker 1: deploy new approaches to matching ads to content. It can
Speaker 1: look and see which of these are working well and
Speaker 1: which ones don't like, which ones are generating more click
Speaker 1: through which ones are not, and using that as like
Speaker 1: a testing ground, it can then perhaps deploy strategies across
Speaker 1: larger groups of customers. In addition to that, it also
Speaker 1: this is something that Todd Garland has actually said, Buy
Speaker 1: sell ads can try and design a publication platform strategy
Speaker 1: that in theory maximizes the publisher's ability to monetize their site.
Speaker 1: And then once they have figured out that strategy, they
Speaker 1: can then license that to other publishers. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: they come up with a process that other publishers can follow,
Speaker 1: and by paying buy sell ads, they'll say, here's how
Speaker 1: you do it, and just work with us, and we'll
Speaker 1: make sure that we match you with advertisers that are
Speaker 1: going to make the best use of your platform, and
Speaker 1: everyone's happy. The advertisers get their ads acted on by
Speaker 1: a larger audience, you get a bigger payout because of
Speaker 1: the ad revenue coming in, and we all get rich. However,
Speaker 1: buy sell ads. Purchasing dig made some folks feel anxious
Speaker 1: is probably too big a word, because at this point
Speaker 1: dig it really wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't
Speaker 1: really in the mind share of your average netizin if
Speaker 1: I am to use outdated terminology. So that being said,
Speaker 1: people were still thinking, well, it might not be a
Speaker 1: great relationship for an ad company to purchase a media company.
Speaker 1: That almost seems like a conflict of interests right. You
Speaker 1: can definitely see how an ad company might change the
Speaker 1: media company so that it just is a vehicle for
Speaker 1: delivering ads, similar to how the algorithm really just wants
Speaker 1: to get as much engagement as possible. There's the fear
Speaker 1: that an ad company would turn a media company into
Speaker 1: just a way to display as many ads as possible.
Speaker 1: The site had reportedly actually kind of made a slight
Speaker 1: recovery over the years after the disaster that was the
Speaker 1: dig version four rollout. It wasn't anything close to what
Speaker 1: it was in its heyday, but it was doing better
Speaker 1: than it had been, so there was this question of
Speaker 1: would this mean that DIG would lose what little momentum
Speaker 1: it grab back post Beta Works acquisition. Well, there's not
Speaker 1: a ton of information out there about this, but Kaylee
Speaker 1: Barber of Digit Day did cite some unnamed former Dig
Speaker 1: employees who explained what happened in the wake of this
Speaker 1: acquisition deal. This was in an article that was titled
Speaker 1: ad tech companies have stopped innovating Why Buy sell Ads
Speaker 1: is buying up media brands? So it wasn't just about
Speaker 1: Buy sell Ads and Dig. There was also a discussion
Speaker 1: about another outlay called Pando, but it was had a
Speaker 1: lot of Dig in it. This article published back on
Speaker 1: October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, so it's a few years
Speaker 1: old now, and according to those unnamed former Dig employees,
Speaker 1: the technology team at DIG was essentially let go upon
Speaker 1: the conclusion of this deal, So the whole tech team
Speaker 1: at Dig is gone. Some of them would actually end
Speaker 1: up being hired on by a blockchain focused journalism marketplace
Speaker 1: that was called Civil. Unfortunately for them, Civil would give
Speaker 1: up the ghost two years later in twenty twenty. It
Speaker 1: shut down after the leadership team at Civil determined that
Speaker 1: the business was just not sustainable, particularly in the wake
Speaker 1: of a massive decline in the blockchain slash crypto industry.
Speaker 1: By sell Ads reportedly absorbed the DIG sales team and
Speaker 1: the business side of the staff into its own operations,
Speaker 1: so they essentially said, all right, we're going to bring
Speaker 1: you in as buy sell Ads team members, not specifically
Speaker 1: DIG team members. Out of the editorial staff, things were
Speaker 1: pretty rough. Within a year of the deal being announced,
Speaker 1: a general manager, two full time original content editors, and
Speaker 1: a video editor were all laid off from DIG. Others
Speaker 1: who had been working in an editorial capacity left on
Speaker 1: their own, and when Barbera wrote her article for digitay
Speaker 1: back in twenty nineteen, she said the entire editorial staff
Speaker 1: at dig at that point consisted of five full time
Speaker 1: employees and one part time staff member. That was essentially
Speaker 1: what was left of dig. Okay, We're going to take
Speaker 1: another quick break. When I come back, I'll wrap up
Speaker 1: this update on what's been going on with dig Okay,
Speaker 1: So we're back. Uh. I was talking about how Digg's
Speaker 1: staff was whittled down after the acquisition when Bisellads bought
Speaker 1: a majority stake in the company. But as for DIG itself.
Speaker 1: It still exists. Dig dot com is a website you
Speaker 1: can go and you can visit it. The site posts
Speaker 1: new art articles on a regular basis. I checked. I
Speaker 1: was making sure because I mean, sometimes you go to
Speaker 1: these things and you're like, oh, there's a ton of
Speaker 1: articles here, and then you click through and you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this was posted like eighteen months ago. That's not the
Speaker 1: case with Dig. There are a lot of new articles
Speaker 1: on the various categories that Dig covers, which includes again
Speaker 1: stuff like news and gaming and sports. Based on the
Speaker 1: bylines that I saw, to me, at least, it looks
Speaker 1: like there's a pretty small editorial staff in place. There.
Speaker 1: There might be a couple of freelancers who write for Dig,
Speaker 1: but mostly I'm just seeing the same names pop up
Speaker 1: over and over again. It also looks to me that
Speaker 1: they are mostly referencing news items that are posted elsewhere,
Speaker 1: like maybe it's a press release, or in some cases
Speaker 1: they're referencing a news article that went on some other
Speaker 1: media outlet. That is not to cast shade on them, right,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying they're doing a bad job because they're
Speaker 1: going to other news sites and saying this article over
Speaker 1: here says blah blah blah. Lots of outlets out there
Speaker 1: do this. Business Insider does this all the time. You'll
Speaker 1: go there and they'll say, like Reuter's Reports or Fast
Speaker 1: Company Reports or whatever. I also can't imagine that any
Speaker 1: of the staff on Dig's editorial group has an opportunity
Speaker 1: to do any sort of investigative journalism. I don't think
Speaker 1: that they have the time to do that, because from
Speaker 1: what I see, it looks like a lot of them
Speaker 1: are posting multiple articles per day, and at that level
Speaker 1: of output, you don't have time to do things like
Speaker 1: take extra steps and really do investigative work. It's just
Speaker 1: impossible if you have an output quota that you need
Speaker 1: to meet. Clearly, Dig does not resemble what it used
Speaker 1: to be when it was first launched, not by a
Speaker 1: long shot. But that raises another question, how is it
Speaker 1: doing as far as performance goes. That's a great question.
Speaker 1: It's also a question that's very hard to answer, largely
Speaker 1: because third party web traffic analytics are not what I
Speaker 1: would call accurate or even reliable. So let me give
Speaker 1: you a pair of examples supposedly about DIG. This kind
Speaker 1: of illustrates why it's hard to get insight into how
Speaker 1: well a website is doing unless you have direct access
Speaker 1: to internal analytics. So if I search for digs web
Speaker 1: traffic analytics on like Google and I pull up a
Speaker 1: couple of different firms, I can get very different information.
Speaker 1: And in fact I did do this, So one of
Speaker 1: the companies I looked at was sem Rush sem Rush,
Speaker 1: and using sem Rush, I'm told that the most recent
Speaker 1: number of monthly visitors to dig dot com was eight
Speaker 1: point nine million. That that was for like August. Eight
Speaker 1: point nine million monthly users isn't terrible, it is still
Speaker 1: a fraction of what digsaw back in its glory days,
Speaker 1: and sam Rush ranks the site as being eleven two
Speaker 1: and twenty seven by web traffic in the world or
Speaker 1: twenty eight hundred nineteenth in the United States. Further, it
Speaker 1: says the average person who's visitingdig dot com sticks around
Speaker 1: for around eight and a half minutes per visit, and
Speaker 1: that there is a bounce rate of fifty six point
Speaker 1: h four percent, which means slightly more than half of
Speaker 1: the people who visit dig navigate away immediately. Like they
Speaker 1: come to dig dot com, they take a look and
Speaker 1: then they go somewhere else, and that the other slightly
Speaker 1: less than half are the ones who are sticking around
Speaker 1: and apparently spending eight and a half minutes on the site.
Speaker 1: But let's say we hop over to a competing web
Speaker 1: analytics service called similar web. Well, then we get some
Speaker 1: very different information. So similar web marks the bounce straight
Speaker 1: at fifty four point one seven percent. Now that's actually
Speaker 1: pretty darn close to sem rush, right. Sem Rush said
Speaker 1: fifty six point oh four. Similar web says fifty four
Speaker 1: point one point seven. That's close enough where you could say, oh,
Speaker 1: there's probably some margin of error that accounts for this discrepancy.
Speaker 1: That's not too bad. But sem rush says the most
Speaker 1: recent monthly analytics had eight point nine million visitors. Similar
Speaker 1: web says, no, no, no, it's four point one million visitors.
Speaker 1: That's less than half of what sem rush said. That
Speaker 1: is a huge discrepancy. There's no margin of error that's
Speaker 1: gonna say greater than fifty percent. You do be useless
Speaker 1: to use the tool. If there's a greater than fifty
Speaker 1: percent margin of error, why use the tool at all?
Speaker 1: You don't have any idea what the real answer is. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: four point one million monthly visitors, according to one web
Speaker 1: analytics site and eight point nine million. According to another
Speaker 1: these do not line up. Moreover, sam Rush said the
Speaker 1: average person would stick around for eight and a half minutes, right, Well,
Speaker 1: similar Web says no, no, no, it's two and a
Speaker 1: half minutes. So again huge discrepancy here. So you see,
Speaker 1: I can't really draw any conclusions about how dig is
Speaker 1: doing as far as performance and web traffic goes. I
Speaker 1: can't even say with any confidence that the site gets
Speaker 1: somewhere between four million and nine million visitors per month,
Speaker 1: because when you've got a discrepancy that that's big, how
Speaker 1: can you draw any conclusion whatsoever. I do think it
Speaker 1: is safe to say that whatever dig is seeing in
Speaker 1: monthly traffic, it is not close to what it was
Speaker 1: before the disastrous rollout of dig version four. I also
Speaker 1: mentioned that I would get back to saying something about
Speaker 1: buy sell ads. Now, before I get into any of this,
Speaker 1: there's some disclaimers I need to make. I have to
Speaker 1: stress the information I saw is based off a a
Speaker 1: very very small number of reviews for the company from
Speaker 1: supposed customers of buy sell ads. And we should also
Speaker 1: remember that the people who are most likely to post
Speaker 1: ads are the ones who have had a negative experience.
Speaker 1: It is much more rare for someone who had a
Speaker 1: positive experience to just say that everything went smoothly, unless
Speaker 1: it was a truly positive experience, in which case then
Speaker 1: they might leave a review. So I don't want this
Speaker 1: to come across as anything close to a definitive overview
Speaker 1: of buy sell Ads. What I will say is the
Speaker 1: trust Pilot score for buy sell ads is in the gutter.
Speaker 1: It is at one point nine out of a possible five.
Speaker 1: Ninety three percent of the reviews are one star. But
Speaker 1: again this is for a very very small number of reviews.
Speaker 1: There are just fourteen reviews on trust Pilot about buy
Speaker 1: sell Ads. The reviews do reference similar complaints. So on
Speaker 1: the publisher side, one review claimed that they signed up
Speaker 1: for service with bisell ads, received a notification about an
Speaker 1: advertiser wanting to post an AD to the site, and
Speaker 1: so they then approved the ad. Like that's how it works, right.
Speaker 1: Buysell ads matches advertisers to the sites, says they're offering
Speaker 1: to publish an AD on your site, yay or nay,
Speaker 1: and this person said yay. Then they said that they
Speaker 1: saw by sell ads had been canceling some of the
Speaker 1: agreed upon ad deals that they had agreed on this
Speaker 1: ad deal. The ad maybe ran for a while, but
Speaker 1: then got canceled early on, and the reason sited was fraud.
Speaker 1: Then they found out that their entire site was removed
Speaker 1: from buy sell ads marketplace because it quote unquote attracts fraud. Now,
Speaker 1: if we assume that this is an honest review, which
Speaker 1: is a big assumption already, this obviously raises flags because
Speaker 1: it was by sell Ads that was sending the ad
Speaker 1: offers to the public sure in the first place. So presumably,
Speaker 1: if there are any issues with fraud, Buy sell ads
Speaker 1: should have an obligation to find that out and prevent
Speaker 1: it from getting to this stage. If the publisher is
Speaker 1: just approving opportunities that buy sell ads is presenting to them,
Speaker 1: how is the publisher responsible for the ads if those
Speaker 1: ads are actually fraudulent. But again, this is all assuming
Speaker 1: the review itself is honest. Other reviews came in from
Speaker 1: the advertising side, with several people saying they had engaged
Speaker 1: buy sell ads to place ads in various campaigns, only
Speaker 1: to find the campaign account shut down after a short
Speaker 1: amount of time, and then they were trying desperately to
Speaker 1: get a refund on the ad campaign because the campaign
Speaker 1: would be shut down prematurely, their own account would get
Speaker 1: shut down, and yet they would have been charged for
Speaker 1: the service. And the ads often mentioned that getting in
Speaker 1: touch with customer service at buy sell ads was practically impossible.
Speaker 1: But again, this is just fourteen reviews. That is far
Speaker 1: too small a number to even remotely call it a
Speaker 1: sample size, and it could very well be that none
Speaker 1: of those reviews are entirely honest or accurate, or even
Speaker 1: remotely so I think it's only fair to point out
Speaker 1: that if you were to go to a site like
Speaker 1: G two dot com, there are just twelve reviews for
Speaker 1: by sell ads there. But those twelve reviews create an
Speaker 1: aggregate score of three point eight out of five, which
Speaker 1: isn't stellar, but it's way better than one point nine
Speaker 1: at trust pilot. Right. So again, a lot of the
Speaker 1: reviews that are on G two dot com are actually
Speaker 1: four or five star reviews. There's one was like a
Speaker 1: no star review which brought the average down, and in fact,
Speaker 1: I think it may have been one of the same
Speaker 1: people who left a review over at trust pilot. So
Speaker 1: I can't make any real conclusion about by sell ads.
Speaker 1: There's just too little data. There's no way to tell
Speaker 1: whether or not people like it or don't like it.
Speaker 1: There's just not that much information, and part of that,
Speaker 1: I think is because it's still a relatively small company.
Speaker 1: But that's the update on Dig and its current corporate overlord.
Speaker 1: I think about Dig the same way I think about MySpace,
Speaker 1: because technically there is still a site that's still Dig,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't remotely resemble what it used to be,
Speaker 1: and it has a fraction of the mind share that
Speaker 1: it once commanded. Like, I don't think people talk about
Speaker 1: Dig anymore unless they're like, hey, do you remember when
Speaker 1: everyone was using dig? That's the context they use that in.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't go so far to say that Dig's grave
Speaker 1: has been dug, because trust me, there's no shortage of
Speaker 1: articles out there that have a similar pun to them.
Speaker 1: But I will say Dig is not even close to
Speaker 1: what it used to be, and I have no reason
Speaker 1: to expect that to change in the foreseeable future. Maybe
Speaker 1: there'll be another change in ownership of Dig in the
Speaker 1: future that brings it back to this more democratized approach
Speaker 1: as what Dig was when it first launched. But unless
Speaker 1: you can do that and also find a way to
Speaker 1: generate revenue so that you know you could pay for
Speaker 1: the whole thing. It may be a non starter because
Speaker 1: if the only thing you can do is seek out
Speaker 1: endless rounds of venture capital funding, sooner or later that
Speaker 1: gravy train is going to come to an end and
Speaker 1: you'll be really stuck. I think a lot of Dig's
Speaker 1: problems actually came out of the fact that the company
Speaker 1: was looking for ways to monetize in a way that
Speaker 1: would be sustainable, and unfortunately a lot of those ways
Speaker 1: were in conflict with the very features that the community valued,
Speaker 1: and that was really a problem. We've see this over
Speaker 1: and over. Right. Twitter is the same way we saw
Speaker 1: a lot with Twitter, where the things that people valued
Speaker 1: with Twitter were things that weren't easily monetizable, and the
Speaker 1: ways to monetize Twitter were things that rubbed people the
Speaker 1: wrong way. And that's continuing today as Twitter has transformed
Speaker 1: into x. So. Yeah, not an unusual story when it
Speaker 1: comes to web startups. Anyway. That's the update on Dig.
Speaker 1: Not much else I can say of any real substance.
Speaker 1: I would love to learn more about it, and maybe
Speaker 1: I'll reach out to some of the people who are,
Speaker 1: you know, apparently writing articles for Dig just to kind
Speaker 1: of get an idea of what it's like, because you know,
Speaker 1: it could very well be that everyone there is incredibly happy.
Speaker 1: Based upon the output, I would imagine it's got to
Speaker 1: be pretty stressful. I remember when I was writing an
Speaker 1: article a day and how that was really putting a
Speaker 1: large stress on me. I mean, I do a podcast
Speaker 1: a day pretty much here, and that is pretty stressful.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine doing multiple ones a day. That would
Speaker 1: be pretty tough. Anyway, that's the update. I hope you
Speaker 1: are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon.
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