347 words from digg’s Kevin Rose

Being the Elvis of Web 2.0 is a busy job, it seems. I’ve been stalking Kevin Rose of digg for about six weeks, watching him sign a girl’s chest, hit the cover of BusinessWeek and attempt to fend off attempts to hire the service’s most loyal users. And basic­ally, not getting to inter­view him. It’s hard enough getting through to people on the West Coast from London. By the time they get out of bed, it’s time for me to go to the pub. I know that Kevin likes a pint, so maybe he’ll come over and we can finish the remaining fifteen ques­tions of my inter­view in a more con­vivial setting.

Well, anyway. Here’s what I managed to get.

Can you give me some facts and figures about digg? Number of users, number of registered users, average visits per user, postings per day, comments per day? Number of staff? Startup costs?

Digg has approx­im­ately 475,000 registered users (you need to register to par­ti­cipate in the voting process). There are 4100 stories sub­mitted every day as of 8/​11/​06, of which perhaps 40–50 make the front page. Right now, the digg work­force is 15 people strong. As for startup costs, digg was very lucky to receive interest from many venture cap­it­al­ists, and so we were in a position to choose who we took money from. One note about starting up is that having a presence on the Internet costs less today than it did two years ago. Bandwidth, servers and the other neces­sities for a Web presence are a fraction of the cost than a few years back. I doubt this could have been done several years ago without going to a VC first and getting that start up capital and building it from that point.

What was your revenue for the last year? Projected revenue for this year?

We cannot comment on digg’s revenue at this time.

Any other sources of revenue aside from advert­ising? Any planned?

Right now we’re driven by Google AdSense ads, and we also have a part­ner­ship with Federated Media. We feel pretty strongly about not bom­barding users with ads, so we’re trying to be as non-​​invasive as possible

To what do you attribute the success of the site?

Digg’s success lies in the demo­cratic col­lab­or­a­tion of its users, also known as web demo­cracy. It wasn’t any type of business when it was first con­ceived. It was just an exper­i­ment that took off. There were others out there that were attempting similar things, but others didn’t come together like digg did. I’ve seen over 200 digg clones since we launched, some backed by billion dollar cor­por­a­tions –but they don’t get it. To succeed you need to innovate, not just duplicate someone else.

In what respects is digg a Web 2.0 site/​service?

One part of Web 2.0 the really fas­cin­ates me is social open sharing of inform­a­tion. For the first time, masses of users are getting together to perform useful tasks online. And digg is a huge part of that. Not only can you read the stories your friends are inter­ested in and talk about them, but digg itself really came into prom­in­ence because networks of friends spread, through word of mouth, that digg was the place to go.

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