Chronicle of a death foretold: Digg and Delicious

"What goes up must come down, eventually" - this old saying couldn't be more right in the case of social networking sites. Sites such as Digg, Delicious, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, which are fighting fearless for our free time, offer (in exchange for our personal information) amusement and a couple of followers.

In the last months of 2010 critics have been hurrying to declare Digg and Delicious dead, while a new platform was picking up the users from the decadent social networks: Reddit. According to the Compete.com site (www.compete.com), Digg has lost in the March - April 2010 timeframe almost 13.8 unique visitors, this means a drop of 36%. Although founder Kevin Rose has tried to give Digg a fresh look, the 4.0 version released in August, 2010, failed to bring in new users and made the site less user friendly. It seems that people got tired of being told what to do: submit, upload, digg, vote, choose a friend etc., and the latest layoffs can mean only one thing: Digg will be soon turned off.

Concerning Delicious, the social bookmarking site has had a similar downfall path as Digg. Acquired by Yahoo in 2005, Delicious numbered more than 5.3 million users in 2008, at its peak. The glory days are bygone, and the second round of Yahoo layoffs has affected Delicious pretty badly. So, the next best thing that Yahoo can do is to shut down Delicious.

As I've mentioned above, the social website that had to gain from all this turmoil, is Reddit. The strange looking alien succeeds to attract more and more redditors daily, thanks to the many niches it offers, and to stay profitable by selling extra-features through the Reddit Gold option. So, while Digg and Delicious are laying off people, Reddit is buying more servers and extends its staff.

When it comes to Facebook there aren't many new things to be said: Zuckerberg created it, 600 million users visit the site on a regularly basis and the "Social Network" movie made the social site even more profitable.

Of course, no one can guarantee that Reddit and Facebook are going to enjoy such a popularity/prosperity forever, but as long as the sites succeed to keep their users happy, in their turn the users will maintain the pockets of the founders plentiful. So, in order to survive in the long term, a social site needs to find a way to sustain itself and which is going to generate profits (real money).

You can read more on monetizing social websites here

A good example of a surviving story in the social networking world is MySpace. The most popular social site in 2006, in US, MySpace was overthrown by Facebook two years later. Now, the site has found a cozy niche where it relies mostly on advertising to generate its revenues.

With 43.2 million unique visitors per month, MySpace succeeds where Digg and Delicious have failed. So, a fresh idea isn't enough to stay in this business, one also needs to think about revenues and how can make the social site profitable.