14 DAY TRIAL // Digg's big relaunch proved to be a big flop. The site has been trying to stay relevant in a world where people get their news from Twitter and even Facebook. Digg v4 introduced a number of features that were supposed to make it competitive but ended up alienating its core audience.
According to analytics company Hitwise, the damage has been rather significant and Digg has seen an important drop in traffic in the weeks since the new version launched.
"Having been a paragon of social bookmarking with over 40 million unique visitors a month at its peak, there has been a huge exodus of traffic thanks to an unpopular redesign which irritated a legion of faithful power users," Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, writes.
"Version 4 was intended to recalibrate the balance of power on digg, making it once again a forum of the online community rather than the domain of the 'diggerati'," he adds.
"Since the end of August, traffic from UK Internet users to digg has declined by 34%. In the US, which is digg’s primary market, visits have dropped by 26%," he explained.
Losing a quarter of your traffic in a few weeks has got to hurt, especially for a site with a rather large audience like Digg. While it's too early to tell if the drop is permanent, it's not looking good for Digg.
Digg has been struggling to make up for the deficiencies of the revamped site and has been making changes trying to keep its users happy.
In fact, since the launch, a number of missing features have been reimplemented and some changes have been made based on feedback.
But Digg users are a particularly hard to please bunch and the core users usually resist any change. Digg is still working on tweaking the site so it remains to be seen if users will return or not.