The Founder and Visionary of Digg.com, Kevin Rose: Internet Wizard or High-Tech Fraud?

In April of 2007, Digg.com Reached an Internet Major Milestone: One Million Registered Subscribers. Will This Success Bring the Beginning of the End for Kevin Rose?

By Rob Mead, published Jun 01, 2007
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Digg.com just passed an internet milestone: 1 million registered users are now online with the very popular social bookmarking site. But back in March of 2006, when Digg.com was at 225,000 users, Digg.com founder Kevin Rose was begging for a handout from any investor who would listen to his pleas. He was desperately looking for at least $3 million, thinking that was enough money to help him reach half a million registered users for his company. When asked why he needed such a huge influx of cash for Digg.com, Rose said he would love to get a cash infusion from anybody who seemed like the "right" fit. Luckily enough for Rose, Marc Andreessen, Greylock Partners and Omidyar Network, among other investors, decided to take the plunge and they invested in Digg.com just weeks after Rose made that statement.

A rumor that was generated after Rose's statement, was that Yahoo! wanted to buy Digg.com for $35 million. Of course that never happened, but statements like the one Rose made, saying that he would allow the "right" company to buy Digg always makes news, seeing as how these huge media mergers happen on a weekly basis nowadays, and magazines love to speculate about who's buying who.

It's amazing that Digg was able to get to the one million mark without a huge company like Microsoft or Yahoo behind them, but you have to give Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson a lot of props for their tenacity to reach that goal on their own. I'm sure that Digg has gotten more cash advances in the form of tech investors after that $2.8 million infusion of 2006, but this article is not about finances. It's about the now uncertain future that Digg.com faces from being the "big man on the totem pole", and from the latest controversy concerning the banning of quite a few people from being able to subscribe and post on Digg.com.

To really understand the implications of "fraud" and "sell-out" thrown in the direction of Rose and company, you'll need a little back story on how Digg.com came into this world.

 
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The Founder and Visionary of Digg.com, Kevin Rose: Internet Wizard or High-Tech Fraud?
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The center of all the controversy, Founder of Digg.com Kevin Rose

Credit: digg.com

Copyright: digg.com

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The number of registered viewers on Digg.com increased by over 300 percent after Paris Hilton's Blackberry phone numbers were posted on Digg's front page section of the news.
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I have never had much success with Digg, but I like getting innovative ideas from the site. Really interesting article, and you can definitely see that there are tons of tech geeks over there. It's very reflective of many of the articles that receive massive amounts of diggs.

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Posted on 06/15/2007 at 4:06:00 PM

 
Additionally, it speaks, or at least whispers, hints at the common mis-conception many have about getting solid copy up into the digg community and whamo-'I may have a hit of an article on my hands just because I threw it in there.' There is a certain numerical threshold one must surpass within the first few hours of loading the article into digg, or it won't even see the light of day in the community. Anyway, I think I read somewhere that that all is about to change. Don't know how you change the prevailing mindset relative to the digg base allowing for good copy that isn't necessarily tech copy, but hey, I think an attempt at changes for the benefit of other copy are on the horizon. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

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Posted on 06/12/2007 at 12:06:00 AM

 
Good to see you managed to get this article/story up live. Push it around you may get some bites on its shelflife. Solid piece.

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Posted on 06/12/2007 at 12:06:00 AM

 
Good grief! I had no idea there was so much sturm und drang behind digg. Thanks for the inside story.

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Posted on 06/05/2007 at 2:06:00 PM

 
Interesting stuff -- there's more to Digg than I thought, and none of it is all that good.

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Posted on 06/01/2007 at 3:06:00 PM

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