Will Digg ever make money?
I recently wrote about the imminent implosion of Digg which was focused on Digg failing at the user level, but Digg could also fail by not making any money. As a recent article on TechCrunch shows, they are getting more funding to keep them afloat because they are not cash flow positive yet.
Many of the comments on that article I tend to agree with. First the audience is largely tech oriented and as techies we tend to not click ads. In a lot of cases we don’t even see them because of extensions that are available for Firefox (which most of us use). So if they are on a pay per click model they are leaving a lot of money on the table. Some of the comments suggested that they needed to lessen their focus on a tech audience and be more mainstream for a larger more ad friendly audience. This is a sound argument but I think that would take a lot of work to get that audience. The main reason being that non-technical people that visit the site will see the tech focus and thus not return. These new visitors will also see the witness the very unsocial nature of the users’ comments and either be disgusted or intimidated. These two items alone will make it very difficult for Digg to break the mold they have created for themselves.
Surely they are looking at other revenue models for getting cash positive and hopefully implementing them before they go broke.
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I thought that the Digg guy was one of the top adsense earners. Maybe he just has a ton of expenses. I just can’t think of what his expenses might be.