Daily Clerks

I have this favorite little site. It’s called Digg. Maybe some of you have heard of it. For those living with dial-up, it’s a social networking news site. Now that they have gotten pretty popular, there’s just one thing that bugs me. That is the possibility of them having to close their doors.

How could they close their doors, especially with all of their traffic? Simple, they do have page views, but the problem is that users are sent to sites off of their own site. So if you see a cool story, and I know there are a ton, when you click on a link, you are to the actual news site. Granted most of us Diggers open the links in a new tab, but still, the point is that the user is taken off of their site.

To keep this from happening, I propose Digg look at some old school web tactics and bring them into the Web 2.0 generation.

1. Use frames. Leave the header and possibly the left nav, in a frame, which also has the leaderboard ad unit, and display the linked site below. This will ensure that the user is still on their site, but more importantly, it will increase their page views/impressions.

2. Interstitials - When a user clicks on a dugg story, the new window/tab the link opens into, displays a brief ad.

3. Surveys - Cheesy…yes. Effective…yes. Makes money…HELL YES! With all of the diggers and their opinions, as can be seen by checking out any story’s comments, diggers are very opinionated. Use these opinions and profit off of them. Simply add a survey on the homepage and let it run. Any company would love to get this info, and advertisers would love to be able to gauge user impressions of their upcoming gear or features. With Digg’s tech savvy user base, this could be a boon for any tech gear company.
4.  Create a deals section - in this section users can submit deals they’ve found online, and Digg can autolink the gear with their affiliate code. Similar to what FatWallet does. Except do it with a twist. Make it so that the user who submitted can also include their affiliate link and swap their code out with Digg’s.

5. Create a p2p digg viewer. I’m always going to Digg, practically a few times every hour, and I know I’m taxing their servers. What would be cool would be to have a Digg viewer that sits on my dock and lists the news. Yes there are widgets out there, but the key to this is the p2p component. By using a p2p system, news stories and processing can be taken off of their servers, thereby lowering their costs and also gives them another avenue to display ads. Yes, ads are annoying but, they can make it so that they reward their users. Do a revenue sharing with users who have installed the p2p digg viewer and pay them based on how long they are online and how much they are processing.

All of these can help Digg make money and stick around. Right now, they are looking for more funding or a simple buy out. Whatever happens, if Kevin Rose and his team aren’t able to maintain control, the deal will most likely collapse, or worse, the site that buys them will turn Digg into something disgusting or simply let it die out.

What would you do to help Digg stay independent for as long as possible?

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