The founder of Digg Kevin Rose has resigned from the news aggregation site he started in 2004 and is close to completing an initial round of funding for a mysterious new start-up.
In the past year, Digg saw a major exodus from its website to rival Reddit after a new management team decided to kill popular features. According to VentureBeat, traffic at Digg fell from 16m unique users to 8.2m users, according to traffic research company Quantcast. Reddit now boasts 14m unique visitors.
According to TechCrunch, Digg walked away from a US$200m potential acquisition by Google at the last minute, in 2008.
Strategic errors were compounded by the rise of Twitter and Facebook as ways of sharing news.
As well as this, Rose had a falling out with Jay Adelson, who subsequently left and Rose took over as CEO.
It is believed Rose is spending much more time with other projects, like Revision3, but plans to continue recording popular online video show Diggnation.
In a tweet this morning, he said: “Wow, tons of questions – I’ll continue advising Digg / on the board of directors, & taping Diggnation (as i have been since @mwdigg joined).”
