The recommendation site that trailblazed a new generation of sites saw an abrupt drop in unique visitors in April. A blip or a trend? And what can Kevin Rose do about it, if anything? (Updated)

Back in January 2006 we asked "Will Slashdot be overtaken by Digg?" The idea at the time that the venerable "news for nerds" site could be surpassed in popularity by a two-year-old site didn't seem tenable - until you looked at the numbers. Those showed that Digg was rushing up on Slashdot - and later that year it passed it for pageviews and unique users.

But now something's happening at Digg. Data from Compete.com - image above - shows that after ticking along at about 37m (and as many as 44m) unique visitors for the past year or so, user numbers have fallen off a cliff - from 38m in March to 24.7m in April. That's a 35% drop, and below the 26m it was claiming back in June 2008 when we interviewed Kevin Rose, Digg's founder.

That means that it's close to falling below Twitter (the orange line on the graph), though it's far above long-term rival reddit, also shown on the graph (the green line). (Reddit is now owned by Conde Nast.)

What's happened? Is it just a blip? Something odd in the way Compete collects data? Since Twitter and Reddit don't show comparable changes, that's probably not it. (Comparing it against Facebook for the same period doesn't show a comparable rise in Facebook users. So they haven't gone there.) (Update:: see the end of the post: we think we've found them. Quite possibly they were never regular Digg users.)

Digg is trying to change - perhaps in response to those frankly scary numbers. In a video released on Friday 28 May, Rose showed a preview of how you can "follow your favourite accounts" where you can follow "My News" which shows stories that have been dugg by your friends and their comments.

Only 120-140 stories make the Digg front story per day - though you'll see plenty more if you click around the site, even if not logged in. The reaction of the Editors' Weblog page: Rose is trying to make Digg the "Twitter of news" - though Rose has a digg... er, dig at Twitter and Google Buzz, saying "And because we're only links and news we cut out all the miscellaneous status updates that you see on other sites." Nice one, Kevin.

However what the new version would look like to anyone who'd never seen Digg but did know Twitter is a sort of "Twitter for news". (You can get a feed of what the people in your Twitter stream are looking at by using Twittertim.es, for instance.) That looks a tiny bit desperate.

What it doesn't look like is the old, slightly mad, Digg. Is this going to be enough then to get people to come back to Digg?

When we interviewed Rose, he talked about turning the site into a social network; what he wasn't clear about was how to make it pay.

And webmagazine thinks that Digg is Deadd: "It was a good run, Digg.com. You certainly had a great idea and funneled plenty of Web traffic to opportunistic and manipulative publishers. Alas, the run is over. And it's not coming back."

It argues that Digg has lost out because it grew so popular that individuals couldn't make any difference:

"The biggest problem with Digg in the past was that unless you devoted serious time to it and knew how to work the system, you had little hope of ever making the front page. The only stories that made the front page were typically those voted up by voting blocs; networks of like-minded individuals attempting to send streams of traffic to each others' sites no matter the content of the story. And if you didn't make the front page, the benefits were very little, if any. Now, you still will need to dedicate serious time to the site -- only this time you won't receive near the level of exposure.

"That is, unless your "friends" vote up your stories at a breakneck pace. Which, for all intents and purposes, puts us right back where we started with Digg. In other words, there's no innovation here and the real value proposition of Digg hasn't changed, it's just become more labor intensive."

It's hard to argue against that. There is a horrible inevitability about some sites' declines. Webmagazine doesn't pull its punches:

"In the soon-to-be end, Digg will become known as the first network to die from social fatigue. Facebook and Twitter are booming, LinkedIn is holding steady and even MySpace seems to have settled into a niche. But Digg is in a deadly, unrecoverable tail spin."

Yet there's still Diggnation - in effect, the live tour that goes with the site, which is still profitable (surely?). But Rose, and Digg, have to face the problem: what happens when your early fans grow up and a new generation starts moving in - or doesn't? A site that can't renew itself and become relevant to a new group, ideally while keeping its previous users, will decline.

There may be simple reasons behind Digg's dramatic fall in users numbers - but losing a third of your visitors in a single month would make most people shiver. They haven't all gone to Facebook. So where?

Update: In the comments, yetanotherusername suggests that the axing at the start of April of the DiggBar - introduced in April 2009, precisely when those Compete stats begin - is responsible for the drop.

But the DiggBar was a framer for content - so that when you clicked, you'd still remain on Digg. If people are now going off to other sites after being at Digg, that's not going to reduce the number of unique visitors; it might reduce pageviews. The DiggBar in effect kept you on Digg longer - it didn't boost the visitor numbers.

What might have had an effect is the killing of the DiggBar allied with the fact that from July last year unlogged-in users who clicked on Diggbar links would take you to Digg, rather than the site pointed to in Digg.

Now, if there's no Diggbar, then there's no Diggbar links, and that means random people around the net aren't seeing them, so they're not clicking on them and coming to Digg.

Update 2: in comments, @kimosabe points to two links suggesting that tweaks in Google's algorithm led to far less inbound traffic from Google:

Alexa shows a 38% drop in search engine traffic from March to April for Digg.com: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/digg.com#search.



And:

They've apparently offended the Google gods, and from the look's of this they're not alone: http://searchengineland.com/google-confirms-mayday-update-impacts-long-tail-traffic-43054.

Conclusion: the killing of the Diggbar, which drew people in from all over without their realising where they were heading, has led to fewer visitors. That's where Digg's visitors have gone: they were unwitting users anyway. Plus loss of Google-driven visitors.

So that leaves Digg - which has apparently received $40m of venture capital in its lifetime - looking about as big as Twitter in unique visitors in the US. But without the momentum. The question still lingers: is it deadd? But at least we can understand what's happening. Kudos @yetanotherusename for pointing it out, and @kimosabe for the Google/Alexa links.