Digg, a large social bookmarking site, has a great impact on the web. Some sites explode with popularity, called the “Digg effect”, based on their submission to Digg. Digg itself is a website that is looking for profit.

How does Digg profit?

Digg is free for users. You can submit your website, and digg/bury other websites without any cost to you. So how does Digg profit?

Digg Shop

One of the coolest ways that Digg profits is it’s shop. Digg sells everything: shirts, sweatshirts, computer accessories, etc. I don’t know how well they do on this, but I’ve seen a few people with Digg merchandise. I wouldn’t suggest that you try to start a shop selling your website’s swagg, unless you’re extremely creative, but it’s an idea that some other huge social networks could borrow. I wouldn’t mind wearing a shirt that said Facebook or something.

A Digg Hoodie

Another way that Digg profits is advertising. This is a common theme between large Web 2.0 sites. If the sites are free to use, and they don’t sell anything (or at least they don’t sell enough to support themselves), how else would they make profit? Digg uses fairly standard advertising. Their ads aren’t as focused as other websites, such as Facebook. The advertisements are choosen from the content of the page, not background information on the user.

What we can learn from this

Digg, in comparison to Facebook, doesn’t do very much. Digg leads you to other websites, which then will recieve money for any advertisements clicked. What about Digg? This is the truth of it: Digg has no content of its own, it just shows users to other websites, so people will click less advertisements on Digg and more on the websites with the actual content. This is one of the reasons why Digg is losing money – people aren’t clicking ads on it’s website.

Tags: Digg, Social Networks, Web 2.0