The 5 Year Story of Digg, In 5 Minutes

The first time I ever heard of Digg was in 2006 when I bought the Business Week magazine that had Kevin Rose on the cover with the title, “How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months.” That article was such an inspiration to me, and I still have it somewhere in my office.

Fast forward to today, there have been over ½ billion Diggs! Since I’m on the Digg email list, I was sent this video below yesterday, and I thought it was so interesting to see how Digg has progressed from five years ago when Kevin was just hoping to make enough money to pay his rent, until today when there are 85 full time employees working at Digg.

Digg began in December of 2004. When the Digg servers crashed in 2005 after Paris Hilton’s phone and address book were stolen and some naked pictures surfaced online, they knew they were on to something.

According to this video, Digg has had –
In 2005: 200,000 monthly unique visitors
In 2006: 3,226,199 monthly unique visitors
In 2007: 17,000,000 monthly unique visitors
In 2008: 26,500,000 monthly unique visitors
In 2009: 37,300,000 monthly unique visitors

A Digg user in this video says, “Digg represents a daily addiction.” Hmm.. sounds very similar to Twitter for me! Kevin even talks about being in the bathroom with Al Gore standing at the urinal next to him. He couldn’t pee. I wouldn’t be able to either. Haha!