14 DAY TRIAL // Digg has had one busy year and, while things are looking up, it still has a lot of work cut out ahead of it. Twitter was a major disruptor and replaced the social news aggregator as a source for many users who found Twitter's immediacy a much better alternative to Digg. At the same time, Digg introduced quite a few products, mostly aimed at generating revenue, but also at improving the experience for the users. But as 2009 draws to a close, Digg is focusing its attention on the things that make the service what it is, its users and the stories.
From this perspective, it wasn't a great year for Digg either, at least from the raw numbers, as the top stories of the year got half the diggs popular stories in previous years got. The biggest story of the year was US president Barack Obama's inauguration getting almost 25,400 diggs.
This was followed by Michael Jackson's death which captured the attention of the world and got 24,800 diggs, just shy of taking the first spot. At number three is "The Story of Prisoner F95488," an US student and talented soccer player, immigrated from Ghana, which may have been wrongfully imprisoned.
Perhaps worrying, for Digg, is the fact that the numbers don't stack up to previous years, for example the top story of 2007 and of all time for that matter, the whole AACS encryption key controversy, more than 50,000 diggs. At the same time, it looks like Digg traffic has been dropping off globally for the past two months, losing five million unique visitors in this time.
It remains to be seen if this is just a momentary loss of momentum or a sign of things to come. Digg does have a few things which could turn things around like a real-time component to the site coming sometime next year. And with things like DiggBar, Digg Ads, Content Ads, Digg Trends providing some much needed revenue to the company, at least it won't have to worry about this aspect for the time being.