Digg Traffic Takes A Nose Dive

It has been approximately one month since Digg released their latest redesign of Digg.com version 4 and it appears that the site is now experiencing a major decline in traffic.  At Digg’s peak, they reached over 40 million unique visitors a month.  However, the uproar and disappointment with the new design appears to have truly caused a mass exodus of users.

Over the years, Digg has made some unpopular changes which resulted in a backlash from their users, however, each time Digg has either ended up reverting the change or appeased their users in some way.  Not this time though.  While they agreed to bring back and fix a number of things with the new Digg, it doesn’t seem to have satisfied everyone.  According to Hitwise, since the end of August, traffic in the US (Digg’s primary market), has dropped by 26%.  While in the UK traffic has declined by 34%.

I outlined my thoughts on how to fix the new Digg last month after the release and while several bugs have been fixed and the upcoming feature has been brought back, I still think there is more that can be done, but most likely won’t be.  The damage seems to have been done, the Digg faithful have either moved onto other sites or just jumped ship all together.  Digg needs to start looking for a new user base if it wants to survive.

In my opinion, right now, Digg just seems like “public RSS reader” with comments and voting which, let’s face it, isn’t too special.