Bigg Digg News: New Funding, New CEO, New Digs

Today marks a huge milestone for Digg. Three reasons: First, because we’ve closed a $4 million Series A investment from Digital Garage. Second, because Digg has a new CEO, Gary Liu. Third, because Digg is leaving the betaworks nest and moving into its own office space downtown.

The formal press release is here. I’ll add a little color, spiced with just a dash of sentimentality:

We’re incredibly excited to have Digital Garage as Digg’s leading investor, and as a strategic partner. DG is an Internet-focused operating and investing company based in Tokyo, and has a long history of success partnering with American tech companies(for example, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Path) to enter Japan and other Asian markets. We think the Digg model of [curation + technology] can find sizable and enthusiastic audiences around the world, and we’re thrilled to get to work with Digital Garage in making it happen.

A betaworks partner, I’ve been running Digg as CEO since early 2013. From the initial rapid-fire relaunch, we’ve grown the user base exponentially, launched Digg Reader, Digg Deeper, Digg Video, Digg TV, Digg on iOS and Android, Digg Originals, Digg’s Canvas CMS, Digg native ads, the Digg Store, the Daily Digg and email products, various mobile web UIs, and most, recently, Dialogs.

Through it all, the Digg team has been incredible, and I want to thank them so effusively it’s embarrassing. Digg’s technologists, editors, designers, and business developers have proven to be absurdly talented, committed, and creative. With a very small number of people, our engineers, led by NYC’s best CTO, Mike Young, have built a sprawling and sophisticated technical infrastructure at vast scale with many interlocking components and interfaces, and that works extremely well. Digg sites and apps look and feel terrific thanks to the vision, clarity, and detail-obsession of Justin Van Slembrouck. Our editors, led by the brilliant and exacting Anna Dubenko, range widely and ingeniously across the Internet and through our powerful data tools to find and package the best stories and videos on the Internet. Not a day has gone by that they haven’t brought me (among millions of other users) delightful things I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered, along with actual LOLs from their headlines, kickers, and growing corpus of original pieces. Finally, the business team, newly led by the enormously gifted and energetic Won Kim, has invented a native business model for Digg, scrappily building it from zero to impressive. I’m tempted to name and praise every member of the team individually, but that’d make a loooong post.

Tying these teams all together since March has been COO Gary Liu. Gary and I overlapped at Google, and his career has taken him through startups to Spotify, where he led Spotify Labs and Ad Product Strategy. When we hired him, my hope was that he would prove to be the right next CEO to take the company from Series A to success at global scale. And indeed, I was right. Gary’s been an absolutely fantastic operating leader for the company, gifted at everything from team leadership to monetization strategy to operational execution to finance to product and marketing, and I’m thrilled to hand the reins over to him. Though I’m going to be an active executive chairman of Digg’s board, Gary is the right leader for Digg’s next chapters, and I couldn’t be more thrilled that he’s taken on the challenge.

And so as Digg gets ready to move into its own office in a few weeks, I’m returning to betaworks full-time, to get new initiatives off the ground. And I’m already more than a little wistful, preparing to miss the Digg team that’s been such a wonderful part of my day-to-day life for more than two years. Fortunately, not only do I still get the daily joy of Digg’s homepage, apps, videos, email, etc., but they’re letting me stay in the Digg Slack channel, which never, ever fails to crack me up.

For some press coverage, check out TechCrunch and/or VentureBeat.

In Which We Consider Digg's Mobile App

Matt Langer wrote an interesting post yesterday questioning Digg for the way our iOS apps present stories.  On Apple mobile devices, the Digg app by default frames and pre-caches the stories our editors highlight so that users can read them offline -- on the subway or an airplane, for example.

Matt’s making a really important point that we take seriously.

Curatorial sites and mobile apps like Digg need to drive traffic back to publishers, along with the ad impressions and clicks that many depend on for monetization.  Digg has two goals: (a) provide a terrific experience for our users, and (b) drive loads of traffic to the best publishers, big and small, so that they can keep producing more great creative work. We want The Digg Effect to be welcome, as users discover not only individual pieces of great writing, graphics, and video, but great sites, sources, publishers, and authors.

And indeed, the Digg website -- where the vast majority of our traffic happens -- does not frame or pre-cache stories, but sends readers directly to the source webpages, replete with the ad units and monetization tools the publishers have deployed.  In the mobile environment, however, we got a raft of input from users to the effect that they wanted Digg to provide a good offline experience.  In response to that, we implemented pre-caching and an embedded frame that presents only the target story.  As Matt rightly points out, that fails to immediately drive impressions and clicks back to the publisher. 

Here’s the conundrum for mobile reading apps:  (1) we want to support and improve publisher monetization as effectively as possible;  and (2) we also want to give Digg app users a great offline experience;  but (3) the vast majority of publishers do not provide portable ad formats that we can grab, attach, and render in ways that enable the publisher to capture all the impressions and clicks their ads can earn. Here's one promising approach that we’ve been talking with some publisher friends about: Publishers provide standardized portable ad units that we can automatically ingest and position alongside their stories;  Digg and other mobile reading apps embrace those portable ad units and deliver impression data, including offline impressions.

We would love publishers to provide standardized, portable ad formats that will effectively monetize their content in mobile readers.  That’d be awesome.  To see if that's viable, we’re going to do a round of conversations with publishers to figure out whether they’ve actually already got something workable (for example, the ad units that accompany mobile web versions of their content, or that some ad platforms have inserted directly into RSS outputs), or whether we should join together to build and implement something new that’d work not only for Digg, but all the other mobile reading apps out there.

It should be possible -- easy, even -- for publishers to know that their ad units are accompanying their content, and being rendered as they want, regardless of whether the reader is reading via a web browser, smartphone browser, web-based reader, online mobile app, offline mobile app, tablet reading app, Kindle, etc.  That may require some rudimentary standardization of portable ad unit formats that can painlessly be created by publishers and automatically interpreted and implemented by all the various types of reading experiences.

The other piece of feedback that we hear from publishers is that they want to know who their readers are. This is a tricky technical challenge that very few publishers have the resources for, but it’s a solvable problem that we’ve been thinking about for a while. Ted Roden and Mike Young — the guys behind the first version of News.me — proposed this to the New York Times and it looks like they’re starting to roll it out now, in the form of NYT Everywhere.

In the meantime, we’re going to take a close look at our iOS experience to see what adjustments might do a better job of sending as many impressions and clicks back to publishers’ own sites as possible, as well as doing right by individual authors.  That may require a change in defaults or more granular user options, or maybe even something more extreme.  We'll keep you posted.