This link has been bookmarked by 55 people . It was first bookmarked on 03 Aug 2006, by Ian Delaney.
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"I don't want to be someone's ticket into a market," Adelson says.
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Rose is listening to his gut, he says. Digg arose out of his everyday life, just as Facebook and YouTube and Xfire did for their founders. During the boom, MBAs dreamed up stuff they thought could nab money. Today, the geeks insist they're looking at ways technology can fill the gaps in their own lives. Then they build those services and share them with their friends. Once something works, they start to dribble it out to the world. But nothing too fancy that needs money to get started.
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Clearly much has changed since 1999, and Rose and his fellow wealth punks have little in common with the sharp-talking MBAs in crisp khakis and blue button-downs who rushed the Valley as the NASDAQ climbed. In the late 1990s, entrepreneurs were the supplicants, and Sand Hill Road, dotted with venture-capital firms, was the mecca. Dot-commers relied on VCs for the millions needed to buy hardware, rent servers, hire designers, and advertise like crazy to bring in the eyeballs. For their big stakes of, say, $15 million for 20% of a company, venture capitalists received board seats, control of the management levers, and most of the equity.
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It also spells out why Old Media types are so afraid of being eaten alive by the creative destruction these young new players are delivering. The barriers to entry are now so low that all it takes is a laptop and a $50-a-month Internet hookup to make a kid the next mogul.
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As such, Digg is attempting to follow the path laid out by Google Inc (GOOG ). and now being adopted by many Web 2.0 companies: focus on building a user community, and the ads will follow. "It's one of those things where we know we could put crazy ads all over the site and clutter it up, but we don't want to do that," says Rose. "We have a clear path toward becoming a profitable company, and we're fully funded. We don't have to worry about it now, as long as we keep hitting our numbers."
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05 Aug 06
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04 Aug 06
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Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. It is now the 24th-most popular Web site in the U.S., nipping at the The New York Times' (No. 19) and easily beating Fox News (No. 62), according to industry tracker Alexa.com. More than 1 million people flock to Digg daily, reading, submitting, or "digging" some 4,000 stories. As on many Web 2.0 sites, people register and create online profiles. Then these "diggers" can upload links to stories and blogs they want to share from other news portals like Yahoo! (YHOO ) News or mainstream media sites like The Washington Post. Users can click a "digg it" button that essentially casts a vote for the content. They can also hit the "bury" button. The stories with the most "diggs" zoom to the top of the page. Of the free labor that is the "Digg Army," 94% are male; more than half are IT types in their 20s and 30s making $75,000 or more. It's a demographic advertisers lust after.
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Digg's stature changed dramatically that day. It is now the 24th-most popular Web site in the U.S., nipping at the The New York Times' (No. 19) and easily beating Fox News (No. 62), according to industry tracker Alexa.com. More than 1 million people flock to Digg daily, reading, submitting, or "digging" some 4,000 stories. As on many Web 2.0 sites, people register and create online profiles. Then these "diggers" can upload links to stories and blogs they want to share from other news portals like Yahoo! (YHOO ) News or mainstream media sites like The Washington Post. Users can click a "digg it" button that essentially casts a vote for the content. They can also hit the "bury" button. The stories with the most "diggs" zoom to the top of the page. Of the free labor that is the "Digg Army," 94% are male; more than half are IT types in their 20s and 30s making $75,000 or more. It's a demographic advertisers lust after.
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The average gamer on Xfire spends an astounding 91 hours a month on the site -- it's like a part-time job. As a result, superhigh valuations are again coming out of the Valley. In a world in which Facebook turns down $600 million deals, the $580 million that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. (NWS ) shelled out for MySpace.com in July, 2005, is widely considered to be a steal.
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The barriers to entry are now so low that all it takes is a laptop and a $50-a-month Internet hookup to make a kid the next mogul.
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COMMUNITY FIRST, ADS LATER
That's why some smart money is on Digg to become an ad magnet à la MySpace.com. (NWS ) Some even refer to Digg as the new New York Times. News sites are discovering they can benefit too: Get a story on Digg's front page, and in comes a flood of traffic from people clicking on the link to read the story on your site. Digg gets advertising via Federated Media, the company Silicon Valley veteran John Battelle created to pair Web sites with advertisers (Digg sparingly places ads in a narrow band at the top of the Web page). So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.
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Until capital becomes important again, venture capitalists are screwed," says Andrew Anker, a former VC
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03 Aug 06
highrollerValley Boys Digg.com's Kevin Rose leads a new brat pack of young entrepreneurs
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M GBusiness Week cover stories lavishes love and praise on Digg
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