Is Digg Infringing On Its Principle?

Everyone is familiar with Google’s youthfully idealistic “Don’t be evil” mantra that has awarded them great praise from their users as well as scrutiny from the press anytime they falter on that promise.Such high aspirations appear to be the trend among the young founders behind some of the Internet’s biggest names.

Another example of this trend would be Digg, with their equally ambitious principles upon which they founded their company.

Digg’s recent decision to remove the top users list underscores their commitment to retain non-hierarchical editorial control and is a prime example of one of their idealistic founding principles. What’s more, Kevin Rose himself has stated numerous times, that it is Digg’s intent to drive traffic back to the originating site. This being the reason why they have not implemented a caching service for sites downed by the “Digg Effect.”

In Kevin’s own words from the October 2nd, 2006 issue of Newsweek:

We really want to continue to drive traffic back to the original source and give credit back to the authors of the articles. It’s really a symbiotic relationship between the two, because we can’t exist without these good, quality sites and the content that is provided online, whether it comes from a blog or from a major media outlet.

Kevin Rose Future Of Web Summit Speech Audio Clip

Now look at a recent statement by Kevin on the December 18th, 2006 Digg The Blog blog post announcing new features:

Videos Enhancements
Aside from giving Videos their own position in the top navigation, we have added a couple cool features: Top 10 hottest videos, and on-Digg video previews. Simply click any video with a play icon to get lightbox window in which you can preview and Digg the video.

This means that Digg has implemented a feature that embeds the submitted video within Digg for users to watch without leaving digg.com.Currently only three video sites have been included in the on-Digg video previews; YouTube, MetaCafe and Google Video (College Humor has also been included in the thumbnail previews, but not the on-Digg video previews feature). As Digg has mentioned in the past, if you run a video site and want to be included in their thumbnail and video preview features on their site, you should email them and they will do what they can to accommodate your site.

Now while this seems like a great feature for digg users, it directly infringes upon one of Digg’s most important founding principles; driving traffic back to the originating site. This is especially dangerous for video sites, as it has the potential to hurt their profitability. Digg has previously driven significant amounts of traffic to both prominent and emerging video sites, allowing them to generate ad revenue from the surge of traffic they received on their site, which allows them to generate the cash to needed to cover the high bandwidth costs associated with being “dugg.” Digg is still using up the same large amount of bandwidth from these video sites, but now they aren’t returning anywhere near the amount of traffic to the originating site, which means they generate little to no ad revenue by being “dugg,” and still have to pay for the huge bandwidth costs associated with the “Digg Effect.”

I know from personal experience with helping run Colbert On Demand that it is very difficult to successfully monetize an emerging video site to the point of profitability (as well as to scale it) due largely to the unevolving state of the hosting industry. With this move of embedding videos directly on Digg, it detracts from video sites ability to generate revenue from their content when being “dugg” and can affect their ability to become profitable.

This is only the first instance of Digg infringing on a founding principle that, has to this point caused webmasters around the web to praise Digg and work to better integrate their site with Digg. This could cause a turning point in the support webmasters have given Digg, especially if Digg implements further features that detract from sending traffic back to the originating site.

Originally posted on February 17, 2007 @ 7:37 am