Last summer, Betaworks bought Digg for a rather underwhelming price (though there was a little more to it than that).
The company put out a new blog post today to let everyone know how well the site is doing since the acquisition, and to discuss its approach to monetization.
“We’re proud of what the new Digg team has accomplished since we took over the site in August,” the team says. “We released an iPhone app, an iPad app (both featured by Apple), an email product called The Daily Digg, and a site redesign. We doubled our users, publishers are starting to notice ‘the Digg effect’ once again, and most importantly, users think we’re on the right track. As we look forward to 2013, we wanted to take a moment and talk a little bit about our approach to monetization.”
Digg did not provide the actual user numbers, but according to TechCrunch, who spoke with GM Jake Levine, Digg has over 10 million email addresses on file.
“Today, our product is about 1% done, but waiting to experiment with monetization models until the product has reached some notion of maturity would be a mistake,” the company says. “In reality, our product will never be “finished,” and designing the business separate from the product would result in a disconnected experience that does a disservice to both.”
Digg is trying out a new “Apps We Like” section (pictured), for which developers can apply to have their apps promoted. Digg says it will only pick apps that it thinks have value to its users. So, that’s a start to the whole monetization thing.
