This is how Digg fell apart. I'm surprised they don't seem to be learning from others' mistakes. They must feel huge pressure to start pulling in profit, but this is not the way to do it. Surely they should be searching for a way to use their vast databases and trend knowledge to make money rather than just exploiting user's attention.
I don't recall people having a problem with Digg's in-stream advertising. It was much more well received than the giant background advertisements they had previously been going with. Digg's downfall had nothing to do with the way they monetized; their shtick simply became a feature of larger, more attractive products.
How so? Browsing twitter.com/username or twitter.com/username/status/tweetid works. Other than a bad habit of giving other people URLs with content in the fragment id which have to be repaired, they seem more competent than most web authors.
Ads were definitely not what killed digg. The biggest upset in balance was the increasing appeal of Reddit, a bloated staff, and Digg 4.0's RSS importer for submissions, which effectively made users pointless (aside from voting). Digg probably was still going to die, but these things certainly sped it up.
No, it wasn't the ads. Digg aways had ads. The problem was that the community felt more and more pushed out the door. And it wasn't just thet there was an RSS importer, it was that digg was replaced a website built around a community with a website that was _nothing but_ an RSS reader. There was an understanding in the community that the new digg was going to be about allowing content creators to advertize, not the previous submission/voting system (which was already skewed to the userbase's tolerance limits).
In short it was not the advertising content alone, but that the advertising content replacing real content in a drive to monetize. That is exactly the kind of thing twitter is doing.
Comments
This is how Digg fell apart. I'm surprised they don't seem to be learning from others' mistakes. They must feel huge pressure to start pulling in profit, but this is not the way to do it. Surely they should be searching for a way to use their vast databases and trend knowledge to make money rather than just exploiting user's attention.
I don't recall people having a problem with Digg's in-stream advertising. It was much more well received than the giant background advertisements they had previously been going with. Digg's downfall had nothing to do with the way they monetized; their shtick simply became a feature of larger, more attractive products.
digg's ads only work if you enable javascript
Twitter only works if you enable JavaScript.
How so? Browsing twitter.com/username or twitter.com/username/status/tweetid works. Other than a bad habit of giving other people URLs with content in the fragment id which have to be repaired, they seem more competent than most web authors.
http://m.twitter.com
Sadly, m.twitter.com does some terrible things to the Android browser and gets it stuck in some sort of redirect loop.
Have you tried its CNAME[1] directly?
[1] http://mobile.twitter.com
Ads were definitely not what killed digg. The biggest upset in balance was the increasing appeal of Reddit, a bloated staff, and Digg 4.0's RSS importer for submissions, which effectively made users pointless (aside from voting). Digg probably was still going to die, but these things certainly sped it up.
No, it wasn't the ads. Digg aways had ads. The problem was that the community felt more and more pushed out the door. And it wasn't just thet there was an RSS importer, it was that digg was replaced a website built around a community with a website that was _nothing but_ an RSS reader. There was an understanding in the community that the new digg was going to be about allowing content creators to advertize, not the previous submission/voting system (which was already skewed to the userbase's tolerance limits).
In short it was not the advertising content alone, but that the advertising content replacing real content in a drive to monetize. That is exactly the kind of thing twitter is doing.
Here is an open letter from Ohanian to Rose where he blames the downfall of digg on the VC meddling. http://alexisohanian.com/an-open-letter-to-kevin-rose
Ads inline with content was definitely a major factor. Just look at this screenshot: http://www.treehugger.com/digg-oil-spill-sponsored-bp-image....
Pretty terrible way to treat your users.