Will digg redesign force a change across the internet?
One of the Web 2.0 Golden Boys, digg.com, launched a redesign last week. Alon
g with some new categories, navigation and design (barely) there was one fairly major change in terms of impact on the rest of the internet. Of course, I’m not talking about the move away from news, or indeed the backing out of some of the more social features, but more this whole content serving “feature”.
In case you haven’t, although I’m sure you have, check out digg.com post redesign and you will find a new video and podcasting section. These aren’t necessarily all that new. People have been digging podcasts and videos for quite a while on digg. In fact, an earlier feature bump this year introduced thumbnails for videos, so it should have been clear that digg was heading in that general direction. Its the way in which this content appears on the digg site that is potentially going to cause the problems. Read on…
Previously, the only content digg provided within the site was a link, a number of “diggs”, a description of the link and comments. Everything else were effectively different views on this information. Users clicked the link and they were taken to an external site to view the content. The content was not, at any point, available directly from the digg site. This, however, has changed. With podcasts and videos (from certain providers) digg have seen an opportunity to cut out the pesky content creators completely from the equation. And not just the content creators but also the content providers. Let me briefly explain. Every YouTube video page has a few adverts dotted around it. This is, essentially, their only source of revenue. It is expected that a certain percentage of users will click some advertisements in order to fund the bandwidth they are using. At this time, YouTube do not add advertisements to the videos themselves. So in order to recoup any expenses from visitors the video has to be watched on the YouTube site.
In contrast 
to this, YouTube has long offered the ability to embed a video directly onto an external site. They even provide you with the code to do so. The advantage of this is that the person embedding the video do not have to provide the large amount of bandwidth and YouTube gets its name out there. i.e. if you see a video you like on someone’s blog you may head over to YouTube to see if there’s something similar that may interest you. And YouTube makes this very easy for you.
The problem with this model is that digg completely rewrites the rules. Firstly, digg easily provides interesting videos for when you’re done with the one in hand. So the urge to head on to the YouTube site is lesser. Secondly, digg carries a huge number of visitors. We’re not talking about someone’s blog with a few hundered, or even thousand visitors. Digg has been consistently in the top 100 sites in the world, according to Alexa. The graph below is a comparison of the digg.com and youtube.com domains over six months. While it shows that YouTube is clearly ahead in terms of readership it’s also obvious that digg has considerable weight to throw around.
So bearing this in mind, we have a situation where the 78th most popular site in the world is effectively stealing traffic from the sixth most popular site in the world. Of course, with visitors being able to stay on digg.com and able to watch videos, they will also be more likely to click those all important ads on digg.com. So the question is, does a site as big as digg.com come with enough clout to force YouTube to reconsider the way it serves videos? As it stands, while the video appears on digg it is actually being served from YouTube, so they are bearing the brunt of the cost. And given the social nature of digg, the advertisements that appear around the video are also likely to be fairly accurate and relevant. It seems like a win-win situation for digg and a fairly troublesome issue for YouTubes new owners, Google.
This post was written on Sunday, December 24th 2006 by Simon T and has been categorised under News , Opinion , Technology , Web 2.0. The trackback URL is here or you could add a response. If you really want to you can Digg Story or add it to del.icio.us, Technorati Cosmos, Blinklist, furl or Reddit.
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