The Digg Story

Digg was my favorite website for a long time. Until I discovered Reddit and liked it instantaneously because of broad range of topics and simple user interface.

In a nutshell, Digg is a crowd powered filter for the content on the Internet. People submit stories. Other people vote for these stories. If number of votes become considerable enough depending on various other parameters, story hit the frontpage. Digg is so popular that most of the times it breaks the servers hosting the websites who reaches the frontpage. Must be around three years old, it has already become part of the Internet history.

But this was not always the case. Site's founder Kevin Rose gave his all for creating this product. His girlfriend left him because he used money reserved towards home deposit in developing the website. I can't imagine the trauma he must have gone through. But I also can't imagine the joy he must have had felt when investors knocked his doors for funding the expansion plans.

By August 2006 his net worth was $60 million according to BusinessWeek. This was after 18 months of launch. Kevin quipped that he still have to save money for a couch as site is still not profitable.

Recently, Google offered $200 million for Digg.