Digg gets $28.7M boost, plans to double size, go global

Tapping into a $28.7-million round of fresh venture capital, Digg.com will embark on a major expansion over the next year, with plans to double its staff from 75 to 150 as well as relocate to a San Francisco headquarters roughly three times the size of its current offices. Among the site's development plans will be the addition of international and multilingual interfaces to the existing site and a renewed shift in personalizing content for individual users.

"This is reactive to some of our growth success," said Digg CEO Jay Adelson.  "We saw some significant acceleration in revenue growth."  Adelson said that Digg now attracts 30 million unique visitors every month (UPDATE: ComScore shows Digg with only 16M worldwide uniques in August), and the company says advertising sales have helped nearly triple Digg's revenue since this time last year.

According to Adelson, the majority of the staff bulk-up will be aimed at engineering and R&D. "We've only completed about 10% to 15% of our ideas of our vision for Digg, and we've still got a lot of ideas in the hopper. Having the engineers here to execute on all that code work — that's a huge part of all this." The new office, which won't be ready until the end of 2009, is a quarter-mile away from Digg's current location in the Portrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco.

Adelson was not specific about Digg's next round of features, but in this video from the Web 2.0 Expo (h/t TechCrunch), Adelson spoke at length about what he called "Hyper-personalization," a model that, instead of showing users the most popular stories, would make guesses about what they'd like based on information mined from the giant demographic veins of social networks. This approach would essentially turn every user into a big Venn diagram of interests, and send them stories to match.

Adelson said Digg had not yet deployed local views of the content, but that it was in the planning stages. "We do believe the implicit groupings of users and interests that we use in the recommendation engine will certainly play a role in the future of Digg and how we can address localities and topics."

The new initiative will seek to boost Digg's connections with other media outlets — the site partnered with CBS News' Katie Couric for the conventions last month — as well as offering media websites a new set of analytical tools to evaluate how their content performs among Digg users.

Digg was started on a shoestring budget by founder Kevin Rose in 2004 and has received two rounds of funding since then, a $2.8-million "A" round in 2005 followed by an $8.5-million "B" in late 2006. The "C" round is being led by Highland Capital Partners but includes previous investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.

— David Sarno

Comments

[diggdude]

Umm- I think these guys are running scared from Mixx.com= they have already executed on everything Digg mentions in their blog and they are growing pretty fast.

[Iconoclast421]

Digg is nothing more than a den of vile internet censorship. It is despicable as an alternative news source. Google "digg bury brigade"

Censorship is the #1 reason why we're in a financial crisis right now. Dont let anyone tell you it is any other reason than that. The censorship on all levels is what prevents the warnings from being received by the general public. Digg has played a key role in that.

[David]

Right now, I'm trying to use Digg to drive traffic to my blog. I don't think it's particularly good at picking up on niche bloggers. With the audience they have though, it could bring enormous traffic suddenly. That's what excites me about what Hyper-personalization will do for us bloggers. Diggdude, you mentioned MIxx. I haven't tried it.. How are they different from Digg?