Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So, just last Friday, we published a tech Stuff classic episode called the Dig Story, and I was thinking, I should probably do a very quick update on what's been going on with Dig since twenty seventeen, except you know me, I don't do quick updates because I'm a chatty Cathy. So we're gonna do that. We're gonna do an update on what's been happening with Dig since twenty seventeen. But first I want to go back and talk over kind of what happened with Dig in the first place, just in case you didn't listen to the original episode or the classic that published on Friday, so that you're not totally in the dark. So Dig originally law lunched in late two thousand and four, and it was essentially a news aggregator site. Dig started off as a site where users, the visitors, the members of DIG would be able to share links to stuff that they thought was useful or cool or entertaining or you know whatever, and It was a site that was all about discovery and sharing discovery. So search engines are great, right, Like, if you are looking for something specific, then you can go to a search engine and you can find a link to something that answers your specific question. That's fantastic. But what if you're just in the mood to you know, browse and to see what's going on specifically, like what's what's more important right now today? What is happening? What if you didn't really know what you wanted to see or read, you just knew that you wanted something, Then a site like dig or Reddit, which launched not long after Dig did and was Dig's big competitor, a site like that could be a huge help. So Dig really focused on the recent and the timely. They really were hyper focused on things like tech and gaming and sports and news, that kind of stuff like that was really where they were focusing. Sharing a link on Dig then gave the entire community the opportunity to weigh in on whether they thought that particular story was important or not. So if folks thought it was interesting or important and they had a Dig account, they could boost the story up the page ranking. This was called digging, an article, and if an article received enough digs, it would get promoted to the front page of Dig, which in turn was being called the front page of the Internet. If the community thought the story was lame or that, you know, maybe it was already represented within Dig, whatever that might be, you could vote it down. This was called burying an article. The philosophy behind Dig was that the community determined what stuff on the Internet was actually worth looking at. It was giving power to the people. Now, none of that would matter unless people actually used Dig. If it had never attracted users, then it just would have been a curiosity and nothing more. But it actually did attract quite a few users. People began to flock to the site and use it a lot, so their participation would ultimately end up having a larger impact on the web in general. Because if you had a piece that showed up on Dig's front page, that could mean a significant boost traffic as people checked out, you know, they click on the article and go to your site. So Dig could end up being really influential. There was this thing called the Dig effect that was a big deal when Dig was, you know, in its heyday, but just a couple of years after launching the site, one of the co founders, Kevin Rose, who was a personality really at that time. He was on tech TV and had a show, a podcast that he launched called Dignation The Pretty Famous Dude. He started to encounter a frustrating experience because there were some companies that were interested in purchasing Dig, and Rose was like, yeah, I don't mind the idea of selling it because he really liked creating stuff and getting it going. But he was less interested in just sticking around forever. Right, He liked the creative process. But he couldn't just sell Dig and then move on to something else because Dig had a board of directors who ultimately had the authority of that decision about whether or not to sell a company, and the board was convinced that the incoming offers, such as one from news Corp. News Corps, which had famously purchased MySpace, just undervalued the company. So news Corp's offer was said to be somewhere around sixty million dollars, but the board director said, no, that's way too low. We need to have a much higher offer before we will consider selling. So Rose couldn't sell to news Corp. He just had to sort of sit back and continue working on the site. Reportedly, he became less interested in doing that over his time at DIG, so he thought it would have been better to cash out and created a new project, but he was beholden to the board. By two thousand and eight, there was a much larger deal that was in the works between Dig and Google. Now, the rumor was that Google offered to acquire Dig for the princely sum of two hundred million dollars, so it looked like maybe the Bard directors had been right right, like they had said sixty millions too low, and then a couple of years later the offer's two hundred million. However, that deal never actually happened. Negotiations fell apart for one reason or another, perhaps a whole bunch of different reasons, and Google did not go through with the deal. In twenty ten, Dig tackled an ambitious and drastic redesign known as DIG Version four. Reportedly, Kevin Rose made a huge number of changes as part of a venture capital funding round, and upon launch, this rollout was a disaster. The redesign went from the very foundation of how Dig worked, like even the actual technology that powered everything was changed, and the changes went all the way through to user interface and experience, and it turned out that not only did it get rid of a lot of stuff that DIG users valued, it was not ready for deployment when it went live because people started to encounter frustrating glitches while interacting with the new design. The whole website would crash repeatedly throughout the day when the site was working, which was never a guarantee. Users were very upset to see historic features just missing from the experience, so, for example, the option to bury a post was gone. Perhaps more upsetting was the fact that this new version of dig would allow news sites to automatically submit articles to DIG, so instead of everything being user generated and user submitted, now the news agencies could actually submit stuff themselves directly to dig. It no longer was in the community's hands. There was also a lot of complaints, although I never found like any real strong corroborating evidence, but there were a lot of complaints that some power users at DIG had a disproportionate amount of control of what could be seen and what would not make it to the front page, and that meant the community as a whole found itself unable to really get stuff seen on the main page, so it was very disheartening. Alexis Ohanian, one of the co founders of Reddit, you know, the big competitor to Dig, actually published an open letter to Kevin Rose saying that the new features in version four suggested that the team had allowed investors to really weigh in on what should and should not be part of the platform, and that rather than listening to the community and responding to what the community wanted, the site was listening to the money, and that that in turn was alienating Dig's users. And it turns out that, you know, a lot of what he was saying was right, because a ton of Dig users abandoned Dig. Many of them actually migrated on over to Reddit. But that's another story, because Reddit itself has had its own ups and downs, including a very tumultuous twenty twenty three. Anyway, the various co founders of Dig started to leave the company over time. By twenty eleven, Kevin Rose was bouncing from the company as well. Lots of users had Traffic was dr being precipitously. It was bad. Meanwhile, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were also growing rapidly and taking over some of the functions that Dig had performed because now folks could create a profile on a system that prioritized communities and networks, at least that's what they claimed to do. Then they could share stuff with their friends on these platforms, So it was social first and then content second. Kind of approach you could argue Dig was maybe you know, content and social together, or maybe even content first, social second. But the point is Dig was seeing other sites drink its milkshake. On top of all that, other companies were poaching talent from Dig. The Washington Post company hired more than a dozen of digs site engineers, for example, so it was pretty clear Dig was on borrow time. In twenty twelve, Dig would kind of of get sold for parts. Different parts of Dig were sold off to other companies, but the site itself and the underlying tech and the ip of what made dig dig ended up going to a company called Beta Works, and the price tag had dropped from that theoretical high of two hundred million dollars with Google to a much less grandiose half million. Don't get me wrong, half a million dollars is a lot of money, It just doesn't measure up to some of the earlier offers. DIG had turned away in its history. I should also add there's some dispute about that five hundred thousand dollars sales price. That's what everyone reported, just about everyone anyway, but tech crunches Frederick Lardinois reported that the actual deal was considerably larger and included not just cash but also equity in the company, and so the value was much higher than what reports had suggested. In that same article, he pointed out that Dig's annual ad revenue was likely more than half a million dollars a year, so it wouldn't really make sense to sell the company for half a million dollars. But then again, Vox dot com reported that Dig ran its entire service off of servers that were on premises. You know, it wasn't a cloud based company at that point, so it was really before cloud competing had made it less expensive to run huge websites. Like, if your website had a fairly modest user base, then you probably wouldn't be seeing enormous bills per month. But for Dig, because of how popular it was, Vox estimated that it would cost a quarter million dollars a month just to keep the site running. So then you're like, well, even if your your revenue is more than half a million dollars, If your monthly costs are two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you're in trouble unless you're making significantly more than half a million dollars a year. But whatever the scope of the deal, however much it ended up being under Beta Works, DIG would relaunch in the summer of twenty twelve with an entirely different approach to content. So instead of having users determine what material would make up the front page, DIG featured an editorially curated front page. So, in other words, DIG determined what went on Dig, not users that were still like scoring systems in place and that kind of stuff, but the fundamental operation of DIG had totally transformed. Now that's pretty much where I left off in that twenty seventeen episode. At that time, DIG was still under the ownership of Beta Works, the company. Beta Works typically focuses on startups that are at the earliest stages of development. So Beta Works looks out for interesting projects and then provides what's called seed stage funding, which is the initial money that a startup needs in order to kind of coalesce from an idea into something real. Seed money helped startups do things like attract the right talent and put together the earliest plans for how the company will actually operate. To take over Dig was a little bit outside the wheelhouse for that kind of company, though, as I understand it, Beta Works mary Dig with a socially driven news web app it had in development called news dot Me. One thing Beta Works did have under its belt was the service bit dot l y, the URL shortener. That's another episode. It also helped develop tweet Deck, which Twitter would ultimately purchase, but again that's a matter for another episode. The heyday of Dig was over at this point, and finding news articles and stuff from the Beta Works era of Dig isn't that easy because people had moved on. Reddit absorbed a ton of digs community, and the new Dig was largely viewed as just another web based news site. So really, in that stretch between twenty twelve and two eighteen, there aren't that many news items about Dig. But then things would change. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. Okay, So, like I said before the break, between twenty twelve and twenty eighteen, you didn't see that many news stories about Dig. It just seemed to be performing like a basic web page that had news items on it, most of which were either written by an internal editorial team or were connecting to external news sources. So the next big bit of Dig's history that I have to share happened. In early spring twenty eighteen, Dig announced that it was shutting down it's OURSS reader tool. So for those of y'all who are not familiar with RSS, it stayed for really Simple Syndication, or maybe it stands for RDF Site Summary. RDF in turn stands for Resource Description Framework. There's actually disagreement on what RSS stands for, but really the initialism doesn't matter. RSS allows for the distribution of web updates or Internet content in general to lots of other stuff. So what does that actually mean? Well, let's take an example with podcasts. How does your podcast app, whichever one you use, how does it know when there is a new episode of the shows that you subscribe to. Well, podcasts published to a platform, and each podcast has an RSS feed associated with it, your podcatching service checks for updates to the various RSS feeds out there all the shows that you subscribe to. So let's say that you subscribe to tech stuff, it does a check to see is there a new tech stuff episode? If there has not been an update since the last time it did this check, nothing changes you, no notifications, nothing like that. If when it checks the RSS link and it finds an update, finds out there's been a new episode added to the feed, your podcasting app will say, Hey, there's a brand new episode of that show you like, so you can listen to it whenever you like. RSS tech led to the development of RSS readers, So these tools let you subscribe to various sources and you can view updates to those websites within the reader itself. So instead of physically navigating to like a dozen different websites that you like in order to just see if anything's new. Let's say that you know you typically visit four different news sites, a couple of gaming sites. Maybe you visit I don't know, let's say it's a financial site and you do all these and those are typically the ones you go to. Instead of going to each of those individually and looking to see if there are any updates, you could use an RSS reader that would just list out in chronological order reverse chronological order, typically what the latest headlines are from the various sources, and they would usually let you organize these in various ways, so you could put all of your sports relaid stuff in one place, you know, all of your gaming stuff in another place, et cetera, and you could just go through and look for headlines that caught your interest. And you don't have to go to each website individually just to see what the updates are. You consolidate everything into a single view. It's incredibly useful. But by twenty eighteen, the glory of the RSS reader days was well in the past. A lot of companies that had previously offered RSS readers had since shut them down. For instance, Google shut down Google Reader way back in twenty thirty. There are still folks out there today, a decade later who are sore about that. I'm one of them. Honestly, RSS readers really made it useful to get a quick look at news, and there still are some out there. I don't want to say that they don't exist anymore, but some of the biggest ones have long since gone away. Anyway, Dig had maintained its own RSS reader tool, and it was fittingly enough called dig Reader, but in March twenty eighteen, Dig announced that the feature would end on March twenty sixth. Molly Mchughotharinger dot com posted a full article about this and lamented the fact that it was the latest in a long string of setbacks for people who just wanted to be able to view web updates chronologically or reverse chronologically. MCEU pointed out that a lot of platforms were leaning harder and harder on algorithms to determine what a user would actually see, and that these algorithms valued engagement and sharing over quality. This internment, we were getting a lot more junk, fake stuff, and misinformation put in front of us, things that would grab our attention but not necessarily reflect reality. That probably sounds familiar, right because we we've been talking about that for a couple of years a lot, But this was way back in twenty eighteen. It just hasn't gotten any better. MCEW expressed sadness that yet another RSS reader was going the way of the DODO, because it marked another example of how it was growing increasingly hard for an individual to curate their own web experience. Instead, the various platforms out there, particularly social networks, were taking over that task for us and dictating to us what we would see as opposed to letting us say, Hey, I'm really just interested in reading information from these sources because I feel those sources are really reliable, so I just want to see those Those options were going away anyway. Just one month later after they shut down dig Reader, even bigger news came out of dig. Beta Works sold off a majority steak in DIG to another company called buy sell Ads. It would not be a total acquisition. Beta Works CEO John Borthwick indicated that Dig's previous shareholders, including Beta Works itself, would retain some steak in DIG. The actual details of the deal remained private. So to this day, I have no clue how much buy sell Ads spent in order to get a majority steak. I don't even know what level that majority steak is, right, I don't know what percentage of dig i sell ads owns, but what the heck is buy sell Ads. That all started with a guy named Todd Garland. He got his start as a web designer, and he found that the part he liked the least about creating web pages or administering web pages was the whole process of securing ads for web pages to help generate revenue. He found that entire process to be slow and frustrating and overly complicated, and he thought, what if you could build some software to automate as much of that process as you possibly can, to make it faster and simpler for the end users. What if you could remove all those hurdles that typically exist and through software, just make it a much less painful experience. To that end, he built buy sell ads so that from say a web page standpoint, a publisher standpoint, a web admin wouldn't have to do anything other than perhaps set a rate, you know, say like, all right, this is how much I will charge an advertiser to make use of the real estate on my web page. And then that person would just wait to see which ad requests get sent to them through this service and then approve or deny from there, and that would get things going. On the advertiser side. All they had to do was determine if the ad rate made sense, Like if they said, well, does it make sense for us to pay this much? Are we going to get enough traffic for that to be a good investment? And if so, then they could say, all right, well we will. We're interested in including this particular publisher as part of our ad campaign, and that would be it. At least that was the idea. I'll come back to buy sell ads because the reputation of that company is a little up in the air as far as I can tell, although from extremely limited information, so keep all that in mind. At any rate, Buy sell ads seemed like it was an odd fit to purchase a majority share in an online media company, But then you could also argue that Beta Works was a weird fit, and Beta Works had done it way back in twenty twelve. However, when you really start to think about it, I argue the buy sell ads acquisition makes a little more sense because an ad company does serve two sets of customers. Right. You've got your advertisers, who want to get ads in front of people, preferably people who are more likely going to act on the ad than otherwise. And then you've got your publishers, the people who have real estate to offer that they want to monetize on their sites or to generate revenue. A company like buy sell ads has to satisfy both groups, right. They have to satisfy both the advertisers and the publishers, and by gaining majority ownership of a publisher, because that's what dig is at this point. It's a publisher. It's not an aggregator anymore, not really. Well, that means that buy sell ads now has a platform where it can actively test out new strategies. It can deploy new approaches to matching ads to content. It can look and see which of these are working well and which ones don't like, which ones are generating more click through which ones are not, and using that as like a testing ground, it can then perhaps deploy strategies across larger groups of customers. In addition to that, it also this is something that Todd Garland has actually said, Buy sell ads can try and design a publication platform strategy that in theory maximizes the publisher's ability to monetize their site. And then once they have figured out that strategy, they can then license that to other publishers. So, in other words, they come up with a process that other publishers can follow, and by paying buy sell ads, they'll say, here's how you do it, and just work with us, and we'll make sure that we match you with advertisers that are going to make the best use of your platform, and everyone's happy. The advertisers get their ads acted on by a larger audience, you get a bigger payout because of the ad revenue coming in, and we all get rich. However, buy sell ads. Purchasing dig made some folks feel anxious is probably too big a word, because at this point dig it really wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't really in the mind share of your average netizin if I am to use outdated terminology. So that being said, people were still thinking, well, it might not be a great relationship for an ad company to purchase a media company. That almost seems like a conflict of interests right. You can definitely see how an ad company might change the media company so that it just is a vehicle for delivering ads, similar to how the algorithm really just wants to get as much engagement as possible. There's the fear that an ad company would turn a media company into just a way to display as many ads as possible. The site had reportedly actually kind of made a slight recovery over the years after the disaster that was the dig version four rollout. It wasn't anything close to what it was in its heyday, but it was doing better than it had been, so there was this question of would this mean that DIG would lose what little momentum it grab back post Beta Works acquisition. Well, there's not a ton of information out there about this, but Kaylee Barber of Digit Day did cite some unnamed former Dig employees who explained what happened in the wake of this acquisition deal. This was in an article that was titled ad tech companies have stopped innovating Why Buy sell Ads is buying up media brands? So it wasn't just about Buy sell Ads and Dig. There was also a discussion about another outlay called Pando, but it was had a lot of Dig in it. This article published back on October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, so it's a few years old now, and according to those unnamed former Dig employees, the technology team at DIG was essentially let go upon the conclusion of this deal, So the whole tech team at Dig is gone. Some of them would actually end up being hired on by a blockchain focused journalism marketplace that was called Civil. Unfortunately for them, Civil would give up the ghost two years later in twenty twenty. It shut down after the leadership team at Civil determined that the business was just not sustainable, particularly in the wake of a massive decline in the blockchain slash crypto industry. By sell Ads reportedly absorbed the DIG sales team and the business side of the staff into its own operations, so they essentially said, all right, we're going to bring you in as buy sell Ads team members, not specifically DIG team members. Out of the editorial staff, things were pretty rough. Within a year of the deal being announced, a general manager, two full time original content editors, and a video editor were all laid off from DIG. Others who had been working in an editorial capacity left on their own, and when Barbera wrote her article for digitay back in twenty nineteen, she said the entire editorial staff at dig at that point consisted of five full time employees and one part time staff member. That was essentially what was left of dig. Okay, We're going to take another quick break. When I come back, I'll wrap up this update on what's been going on with dig Okay, So we're back. Uh. I was talking about how Digg's staff was whittled down after the acquisition when Bisellads bought a majority stake in the company. But as for DIG itself. It still exists. Dig dot com is a website you can go and you can visit it. The site posts new art articles on a regular basis. I checked. I was making sure because I mean, sometimes you go to these things and you're like, oh, there's a ton of articles here, and then you click through and you're like, oh, this was posted like eighteen months ago. That's not the case with Dig. There are a lot of new articles on the various categories that Dig covers, which includes again stuff like news and gaming and sports. Based on the bylines that I saw, to me, at least, it looks like there's a pretty small editorial staff in place. There. There might be a couple of freelancers who write for Dig, but mostly I'm just seeing the same names pop up over and over again. It also looks to me that they are mostly referencing news items that are posted elsewhere, like maybe it's a press release, or in some cases they're referencing a news article that went on some other media outlet. That is not to cast shade on them, right, I'm not saying they're doing a bad job because they're going to other news sites and saying this article over here says blah blah blah. Lots of outlets out there do this. Business Insider does this all the time. You'll go there and they'll say, like Reuter's Reports or Fast Company Reports or whatever. I also can't imagine that any of the staff on Dig's editorial group has an opportunity to do any sort of investigative journalism. I don't think that they have the time to do that, because from what I see, it looks like a lot of them are posting multiple articles per day, and at that level of output, you don't have time to do things like take extra steps and really do investigative work. It's just impossible if you have an output quota that you need to meet. Clearly, Dig does not resemble what it used to be when it was first launched, not by a long shot. But that raises another question, how is it doing as far as performance goes. That's a great question. It's also a question that's very hard to answer, largely because third party web traffic analytics are not what I would call accurate or even reliable. So let me give you a pair of examples supposedly about DIG. This kind of illustrates why it's hard to get insight into how well a website is doing unless you have direct access to internal analytics. So if I search for digs web traffic analytics on like Google and I pull up a couple of different firms, I can get very different information. And in fact I did do this, So one of the companies I looked at was sem Rush sem Rush, and using sem Rush, I'm told that the most recent number of monthly visitors to dig dot com was eight point nine million. That that was for like August. Eight point nine million monthly users isn't terrible, it is still a fraction of what digsaw back in its glory days, and sam Rush ranks the site as being eleven two and twenty seven by web traffic in the world or twenty eight hundred nineteenth in the United States. Further, it says the average person who's visitingdig dot com sticks around for around eight and a half minutes per visit, and that there is a bounce rate of fifty six point h four percent, which means slightly more than half of the people who visit dig navigate away immediately. Like they come to dig dot com, they take a look and then they go somewhere else, and that the other slightly less than half are the ones who are sticking around and apparently spending eight and a half minutes on the site. But let's say we hop over to a competing web analytics service called similar web. Well, then we get some very different information. So similar web marks the bounce straight at fifty four point one seven percent. Now that's actually pretty darn close to sem rush, right. Sem Rush said fifty six point oh four. Similar web says fifty four point one point seven. That's close enough where you could say, oh, there's probably some margin of error that accounts for this discrepancy. That's not too bad. But sem rush says the most recent monthly analytics had eight point nine million visitors. Similar web says, no, no, no, it's four point one million visitors. That's less than half of what sem rush said. That is a huge discrepancy. There's no margin of error that's gonna say greater than fifty percent. You do be useless to use the tool. If there's a greater than fifty percent margin of error, why use the tool at all? You don't have any idea what the real answer is. So, yeah, four point one million monthly visitors, according to one web analytics site and eight point nine million. According to another these do not line up. Moreover, sam Rush said the average person would stick around for eight and a half minutes, right, Well, similar Web says no, no, no, it's two and a half minutes. So again huge discrepancy here. So you see, I can't really draw any conclusions about how dig is doing as far as performance and web traffic goes. I can't even say with any confidence that the site gets somewhere between four million and nine million visitors per month, because when you've got a discrepancy that that's big, how can you draw any conclusion whatsoever. I do think it is safe to say that whatever dig is seeing in monthly traffic, it is not close to what it was before the disastrous rollout of dig version four. I also mentioned that I would get back to saying something about buy sell ads. Now, before I get into any of this, there's some disclaimers I need to make. I have to stress the information I saw is based off a a very very small number of reviews for the company from supposed customers of buy sell ads. And we should also remember that the people who are most likely to post ads are the ones who have had a negative experience. It is much more rare for someone who had a positive experience to just say that everything went smoothly, unless it was a truly positive experience, in which case then they might leave a review. So I don't want this to come across as anything close to a definitive overview of buy sell Ads. What I will say is the trust Pilot score for buy sell ads is in the gutter. It is at one point nine out of a possible five. Ninety three percent of the reviews are one star. But again this is for a very very small number of reviews. There are just fourteen reviews on trust Pilot about buy sell Ads. The reviews do reference similar complaints. So on the publisher side, one review claimed that they signed up for service with bisell ads, received a notification about an advertiser wanting to post an AD to the site, and so they then approved the ad. Like that's how it works, right. Buysell ads matches advertisers to the sites, says they're offering to publish an AD on your site, yay or nay, and this person said yay. Then they said that they saw by sell ads had been canceling some of the agreed upon ad deals that they had agreed on this ad deal. The ad maybe ran for a while, but then got canceled early on, and the reason sited was fraud. Then they found out that their entire site was removed from buy sell ads marketplace because it quote unquote attracts fraud. Now, if we assume that this is an honest review, which is a big assumption already, this obviously raises flags because it was by sell Ads that was sending the ad offers to the public sure in the first place. So presumably, if there are any issues with fraud, Buy sell ads should have an obligation to find that out and prevent it from getting to this stage. If the publisher is just approving opportunities that buy sell ads is presenting to them, how is the publisher responsible for the ads if those ads are actually fraudulent. But again, this is all assuming the review itself is honest. Other reviews came in from the advertising side, with several people saying they had engaged buy sell ads to place ads in various campaigns, only to find the campaign account shut down after a short amount of time, and then they were trying desperately to get a refund on the ad campaign because the campaign would be shut down prematurely, their own account would get shut down, and yet they would have been charged for the service. And the ads often mentioned that getting in touch with customer service at buy sell ads was practically impossible. But again, this is just fourteen reviews. That is far too small a number to even remotely call it a sample size, and it could very well be that none of those reviews are entirely honest or accurate, or even remotely so I think it's only fair to point out that if you were to go to a site like G two dot com, there are just twelve reviews for by sell ads there. But those twelve reviews create an aggregate score of three point eight out of five, which isn't stellar, but it's way better than one point nine at trust pilot. Right. So again, a lot of the reviews that are on G two dot com are actually four or five star reviews. There's one was like a no star review which brought the average down, and in fact, I think it may have been one of the same people who left a review over at trust pilot. So I can't make any real conclusion about by sell ads. There's just too little data. There's no way to tell whether or not people like it or don't like it. There's just not that much information, and part of that, I think is because it's still a relatively small company. But that's the update on Dig and its current corporate overlord. I think about Dig the same way I think about MySpace, because technically there is still a site that's still Dig, but it doesn't remotely resemble what it used to be, and it has a fraction of the mind share that it once commanded. Like, I don't think people talk about Dig anymore unless they're like, hey, do you remember when everyone was using dig? That's the context they use that in. I wouldn't go so far to say that Dig's grave has been dug, because trust me, there's no shortage of articles out there that have a similar pun to them. But I will say Dig is not even close to what it used to be, and I have no reason to expect that to change in the foreseeable future. Maybe there'll be another change in ownership of Dig in the future that brings it back to this more democratized approach as what Dig was when it first launched. But unless you can do that and also find a way to generate revenue so that you know you could pay for the whole thing. It may be a non starter because if the only thing you can do is seek out endless rounds of venture capital funding, sooner or later that gravy train is going to come to an end and you'll be really stuck. I think a lot of Dig's problems actually came out of the fact that the company was looking for ways to monetize in a way that would be sustainable, and unfortunately a lot of those ways were in conflict with the very features that the community valued, and that was really a problem. We've see this over and over. Right. Twitter is the same way we saw a lot with Twitter, where the things that people valued with Twitter were things that weren't easily monetizable, and the ways to monetize Twitter were things that rubbed people the wrong way. And that's continuing today as Twitter has transformed into x. So. Yeah, not an unusual story when it comes to web startups. Anyway. That's the update on Dig. Not much else I can say of any real substance. I would love to learn more about it, and maybe I'll reach out to some of the people who are, you know, apparently writing articles for Dig just to kind of get an idea of what it's like, because you know, it could very well be that everyone there is incredibly happy. Based upon the output, I would imagine it's got to be pretty stressful. I remember when I was writing an article a day and how that was really putting a large stress on me. I mean, I do a podcast a day pretty much here, and that is pretty stressful. I can't imagine doing multiple ones a day. That would be pretty tough. Anyway, that's the update. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So, just last Friday, we published a tech Stuff classic episode called the Dig Story, and I was thinking, I should probably do a very quick update on what's been going on with Dig since twenty seventeen, except you know me, I don't do quick updates because I'm a chatty Cathy. So we're gonna do that. We're gonna do an update on what's been happening with Dig since twenty seventeen. But first I want to go back and talk over kind of what happened with Dig in the first place, just in case you didn't listen to the original episode or the classic that published on Friday, so that you're not totally in the dark. So Dig originally law lunched in late two thousand and four, and it was essentially a news aggregator site. Dig started off as a site where users, the visitors, the members of DIG would be able to share links to stuff that they thought was useful or cool or entertaining or you know whatever, and It was a site that was all about discovery and sharing discovery. So search engines are great, right, Like, if you are looking for something specific, then you can go to a search engine and you can find a link to something that answers your specific question. That's fantastic. But what if you're just in the mood to you know, browse and to see what's going on specifically, like what's what's more important right now today? What is happening? What if you didn't really know what you wanted to see or read, you just knew that you wanted something, Then a site like dig or Reddit, which launched not long after Dig did and was Dig's big competitor, a site like that could be a huge help. So Dig really focused on the recent and the timely. They really were hyper focused on things like tech and gaming and sports and news, that kind of stuff like that was really where they were focusing. Sharing a link on Dig then gave the entire community the opportunity to weigh in on whether they thought that particular story was important or not. So if folks thought it was interesting or important and they had a Dig account, they could boost the story up the page ranking. This was called digging, an article, and if an article received enough digs, it would get promoted to the front page of Dig, which in turn was being called the front page of the Internet. If the community thought the story was lame or that, you know, maybe it was already represented within Dig, whatever that might be, you could vote it down. This was called burying an article. The philosophy behind Dig was that the community determined what stuff on the Internet was actually worth looking at. It was giving power to the people. Now, none of that would matter unless people actually used Dig. If it had never attracted users, then it just would have been a curiosity and nothing more. But it actually did attract quite a few users. People began to flock to the site and use it a lot, so their participation would ultimately end up having a larger impact on the web in general. Because if you had a piece that showed up on Dig's front page, that could mean a significant boost traffic as people checked out, you know, they click on the article and go to your site. So Dig could end up being really influential. There was this thing called the Dig effect that was a big deal when Dig was, you know, in its heyday, but just a couple of years after launching the site, one of the co founders, Kevin Rose, who was a personality really at that time. He was on tech TV and had a show, a podcast that he launched called Dignation The Pretty Famous Dude. He started to encounter a frustrating experience because there were some companies that were interested in purchasing Dig, and Rose was like, yeah, I don't mind the idea of selling it because he really liked creating stuff and getting it going. But he was less interested in just sticking around forever. Right, He liked the creative process. But he couldn't just sell Dig and then move on to something else because Dig had a board of directors who ultimately had the authority of that decision about whether or not to sell a company, and the board was convinced that the incoming offers, such as one from news Corp. News Corps, which had famously purchased MySpace, just undervalued the company. So news Corp's offer was said to be somewhere around sixty million dollars, but the board director said, no, that's way too low. We need to have a much higher offer before we will consider selling. So Rose couldn't sell to news Corp. He just had to sort of sit back and continue working on the site. Reportedly, he became less interested in doing that over his time at DIG, so he thought it would have been better to cash out and created a new project, but he was beholden to the board. By two thousand and eight, there was a much larger deal that was in the works between Dig and Google. Now, the rumor was that Google offered to acquire Dig for the princely sum of two hundred million dollars, so it looked like maybe the Bard directors had been right right, like they had said sixty millions too low, and then a couple of years later the offer's two hundred million. However, that deal never actually happened. Negotiations fell apart for one reason or another, perhaps a whole bunch of different reasons, and Google did not go through with the deal. In twenty ten, Dig tackled an ambitious and drastic redesign known as DIG Version four. Reportedly, Kevin Rose made a huge number of changes as part of a venture capital funding round, and upon launch, this rollout was a disaster. The redesign went from the very foundation of how Dig worked, like even the actual technology that powered everything was changed, and the changes went all the way through to user interface and experience, and it turned out that not only did it get rid of a lot of stuff that DIG users valued, it was not ready for deployment when it went live because people started to encounter frustrating glitches while interacting with the new design. The whole website would crash repeatedly throughout the day when the site was working, which was never a guarantee. Users were very upset to see historic features just missing from the experience, so, for example, the option to bury a post was gone. Perhaps more upsetting was the fact that this new version of dig would allow news sites to automatically submit articles to DIG, so instead of everything being user generated and user submitted, now the news agencies could actually submit stuff themselves directly to dig. It no longer was in the community's hands. There was also a lot of complaints, although I never found like any real strong corroborating evidence, but there were a lot of complaints that some power users at DIG had a disproportionate amount of control of what could be seen and what would not make it to the front page, and that meant the community as a whole found itself unable to really get stuff seen on the main page, so it was very disheartening. Alexis Ohanian, one of the co founders of Reddit, you know, the big competitor to Dig, actually published an open letter to Kevin Rose saying that the new features in version four suggested that the team had allowed investors to really weigh in on what should and should not be part of the platform, and that rather than listening to the community and responding to what the community wanted, the site was listening to the money, and that that in turn was alienating Dig's users. And it turns out that, you know, a lot of what he was saying was right, because a ton of Dig users abandoned Dig. Many of them actually migrated on over to Reddit. But that's another story, because Reddit itself has had its own ups and downs, including a very tumultuous twenty twenty three. Anyway, the various co founders of Dig started to leave the company over time. By twenty eleven, Kevin Rose was bouncing from the company as well. Lots of users had Traffic was dr being precipitously. It was bad. Meanwhile, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were also growing rapidly and taking over some of the functions that Dig had performed because now folks could create a profile on a system that prioritized communities and networks, at least that's what they claimed to do. Then they could share stuff with their friends on these platforms, So it was social first and then content second. Kind of approach you could argue Dig was maybe you know, content and social together, or maybe even content first, social second. But the point is Dig was seeing other sites drink its milkshake. On top of all that, other companies were poaching talent from Dig. The Washington Post company hired more than a dozen of digs site engineers, for example, so it was pretty clear Dig was on borrow time. In twenty twelve, Dig would kind of of get sold for parts. Different parts of Dig were sold off to other companies, but the site itself and the underlying tech and the ip of what made dig dig ended up going to a company called Beta Works, and the price tag had dropped from that theoretical high of two hundred million dollars with Google to a much less grandiose half million. Don't get me wrong, half a million dollars is a lot of money, It just doesn't measure up to some of the earlier offers. DIG had turned away in its history. I should also add there's some dispute about that five hundred thousand dollars sales price. That's what everyone reported, just about everyone anyway, but tech crunches Frederick Lardinois reported that the actual deal was considerably larger and included not just cash but also equity in the company, and so the value was much higher than what reports had suggested. In that same article, he pointed out that Dig's annual ad revenue was likely more than half a million dollars a year, so it wouldn't really make sense to sell the company for half a million dollars. But then again, Vox dot com reported that Dig ran its entire service off of servers that were on premises. You know, it wasn't a cloud based company at that point, so it was really before cloud competing had made it less expensive to run huge websites. Like, if your website had a fairly modest user base, then you probably wouldn't be seeing enormous bills per month. But for Dig, because of how popular it was, Vox estimated that it would cost a quarter million dollars a month just to keep the site running. So then you're like, well, even if your your revenue is more than half a million dollars, If your monthly costs are two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, you're in trouble unless you're making significantly more than half a million dollars a year. But whatever the scope of the deal, however much it ended up being under Beta Works, DIG would relaunch in the summer of twenty twelve with an entirely different approach to content. So instead of having users determine what material would make up the front page, DIG featured an editorially curated front page. So, in other words, DIG determined what went on Dig, not users that were still like scoring systems in place and that kind of stuff, but the fundamental operation of DIG had totally transformed. Now that's pretty much where I left off in that twenty seventeen episode. At that time, DIG was still under the ownership of Beta Works, the company. Beta Works typically focuses on startups that are at the earliest stages of development. So Beta Works looks out for interesting projects and then provides what's called seed stage funding, which is the initial money that a startup needs in order to kind of coalesce from an idea into something real. Seed money helped startups do things like attract the right talent and put together the earliest plans for how the company will actually operate. To take over Dig was a little bit outside the wheelhouse for that kind of company, though, as I understand it, Beta Works mary Dig with a socially driven news web app it had in development called news dot Me. One thing Beta Works did have under its belt was the service bit dot l y, the URL shortener. That's another episode. It also helped develop tweet Deck, which Twitter would ultimately purchase, but again that's a matter for another episode. The heyday of Dig was over at this point, and finding news articles and stuff from the Beta Works era of Dig isn't that easy because people had moved on. Reddit absorbed a ton of digs community, and the new Dig was largely viewed as just another web based news site. So really, in that stretch between twenty twelve and two eighteen, there aren't that many news items about Dig. But then things would change. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. Okay, So, like I said before the break, between twenty twelve and twenty eighteen, you didn't see that many news stories about Dig. It just seemed to be performing like a basic web page that had news items on it, most of which were either written by an internal editorial team or were connecting to external news sources. So the next big bit of Dig's history that I have to share happened. In early spring twenty eighteen, Dig announced that it was shutting down it's OURSS reader tool. So for those of y'all who are not familiar with RSS, it stayed for really Simple Syndication, or maybe it stands for RDF Site Summary. RDF in turn stands for Resource Description Framework. There's actually disagreement on what RSS stands for, but really the initialism doesn't matter. RSS allows for the distribution of web updates or Internet content in general to lots of other stuff. So what does that actually mean? Well, let's take an example with podcasts. How does your podcast app, whichever one you use, how does it know when there is a new episode of the shows that you subscribe to. Well, podcasts published to a platform, and each podcast has an RSS feed associated with it, your podcatching service checks for updates to the various RSS feeds out there all the shows that you subscribe to. So let's say that you subscribe to tech stuff, it does a check to see is there a new tech stuff episode? If there has not been an update since the last time it did this check, nothing changes you, no notifications, nothing like that. If when it checks the RSS link and it finds an update, finds out there's been a new episode added to the feed, your podcasting app will say, Hey, there's a brand new episode of that show you like, so you can listen to it whenever you like. RSS tech led to the development of RSS readers, So these tools let you subscribe to various sources and you can view updates to those websites within the reader itself. So instead of physically navigating to like a dozen different websites that you like in order to just see if anything's new. Let's say that you know you typically visit four different news sites, a couple of gaming sites. Maybe you visit I don't know, let's say it's a financial site and you do all these and those are typically the ones you go to. Instead of going to each of those individually and looking to see if there are any updates, you could use an RSS reader that would just list out in chronological order reverse chronological order, typically what the latest headlines are from the various sources, and they would usually let you organize these in various ways, so you could put all of your sports relaid stuff in one place, you know, all of your gaming stuff in another place, et cetera, and you could just go through and look for headlines that caught your interest. And you don't have to go to each website individually just to see what the updates are. You consolidate everything into a single view. It's incredibly useful. But by twenty eighteen, the glory of the RSS reader days was well in the past. A lot of companies that had previously offered RSS readers had since shut them down. For instance, Google shut down Google Reader way back in twenty thirty. There are still folks out there today, a decade later who are sore about that. I'm one of them. Honestly, RSS readers really made it useful to get a quick look at news, and there still are some out there. I don't want to say that they don't exist anymore, but some of the biggest ones have long since gone away. Anyway, Dig had maintained its own RSS reader tool, and it was fittingly enough called dig Reader, but in March twenty eighteen, Dig announced that the feature would end on March twenty sixth. Molly Mchughotharinger dot com posted a full article about this and lamented the fact that it was the latest in a long string of setbacks for people who just wanted to be able to view web updates chronologically or reverse chronologically. MCEU pointed out that a lot of platforms were leaning harder and harder on algorithms to determine what a user would actually see, and that these algorithms valued engagement and sharing over quality. This internment, we were getting a lot more junk, fake stuff, and misinformation put in front of us, things that would grab our attention but not necessarily reflect reality. That probably sounds familiar, right because we we've been talking about that for a couple of years a lot, But this was way back in twenty eighteen. It just hasn't gotten any better. MCEW expressed sadness that yet another RSS reader was going the way of the DODO, because it marked another example of how it was growing increasingly hard for an individual to curate their own web experience. Instead, the various platforms out there, particularly social networks, were taking over that task for us and dictating to us what we would see as opposed to letting us say, Hey, I'm really just interested in reading information from these sources because I feel those sources are really reliable, so I just want to see those Those options were going away anyway. Just one month later after they shut down dig Reader, even bigger news came out of dig. Beta Works sold off a majority steak in DIG to another company called buy sell Ads. It would not be a total acquisition. Beta Works CEO John Borthwick indicated that Dig's previous shareholders, including Beta Works itself, would retain some steak in DIG. The actual details of the deal remained private. So to this day, I have no clue how much buy sell Ads spent in order to get a majority steak. I don't even know what level that majority steak is, right, I don't know what percentage of dig i sell ads owns, but what the heck is buy sell Ads. That all started with a guy named Todd Garland. He got his start as a web designer, and he found that the part he liked the least about creating web pages or administering web pages was the whole process of securing ads for web pages to help generate revenue. He found that entire process to be slow and frustrating and overly complicated, and he thought, what if you could build some software to automate as much of that process as you possibly can, to make it faster and simpler for the end users. What if you could remove all those hurdles that typically exist and through software, just make it a much less painful experience. To that end, he built buy sell ads so that from say a web page standpoint, a publisher standpoint, a web admin wouldn't have to do anything other than perhaps set a rate, you know, say like, all right, this is how much I will charge an advertiser to make use of the real estate on my web page. And then that person would just wait to see which ad requests get sent to them through this service and then approve or deny from there, and that would get things going. On the advertiser side. All they had to do was determine if the ad rate made sense, Like if they said, well, does it make sense for us to pay this much? Are we going to get enough traffic for that to be a good investment? And if so, then they could say, all right, well we will. We're interested in including this particular publisher as part of our ad campaign, and that would be it. At least that was the idea. I'll come back to buy sell ads because the reputation of that company is a little up in the air as far as I can tell, although from extremely limited information, so keep all that in mind. At any rate, Buy sell ads seemed like it was an odd fit to purchase a majority share in an online media company, But then you could also argue that Beta Works was a weird fit, and Beta Works had done it way back in twenty twelve. However, when you really start to think about it, I argue the buy sell ads acquisition makes a little more sense because an ad company does serve two sets of customers. Right. You've got your advertisers, who want to get ads in front of people, preferably people who are more likely going to act on the ad than otherwise. And then you've got your publishers, the people who have real estate to offer that they want to monetize on their sites or to generate revenue. A company like buy sell ads has to satisfy both groups, right. They have to satisfy both the advertisers and the publishers, and by gaining majority ownership of a publisher, because that's what dig is at this point. It's a publisher. It's not an aggregator anymore, not really. Well, that means that buy sell ads now has a platform where it can actively test out new strategies. It can deploy new approaches to matching ads to content. It can look and see which of these are working well and which ones don't like, which ones are generating more click through which ones are not, and using that as like a testing ground, it can then perhaps deploy strategies across larger groups of customers. In addition to that, it also this is something that Todd Garland has actually said, Buy sell ads can try and design a publication platform strategy that in theory maximizes the publisher's ability to monetize their site. And then once they have figured out that strategy, they can then license that to other publishers. So, in other words, they come up with a process that other publishers can follow, and by paying buy sell ads, they'll say, here's how you do it, and just work with us, and we'll make sure that we match you with advertisers that are going to make the best use of your platform, and everyone's happy. The advertisers get their ads acted on by a larger audience, you get a bigger payout because of the ad revenue coming in, and we all get rich. However, buy sell ads. Purchasing dig made some folks feel anxious is probably too big a word, because at this point dig it really wasn't in the spotlight anymore. It wasn't really in the mind share of your average netizin if I am to use outdated terminology. So that being said, people were still thinking, well, it might not be a great relationship for an ad company to purchase a media company. That almost seems like a conflict of interests right. You can definitely see how an ad company might change the media company so that it just is a vehicle for delivering ads, similar to how the algorithm really just wants to get as much engagement as possible. There's the fear that an ad company would turn a media company into just a way to display as many ads as possible. The site had reportedly actually kind of made a slight recovery over the years after the disaster that was the dig version four rollout. It wasn't anything close to what it was in its heyday, but it was doing better than it had been, so there was this question of would this mean that DIG would lose what little momentum it grab back post Beta Works acquisition. Well, there's not a ton of information out there about this, but Kaylee Barber of Digit Day did cite some unnamed former Dig employees who explained what happened in the wake of this acquisition deal. This was in an article that was titled ad tech companies have stopped innovating Why Buy sell Ads is buying up media brands? So it wasn't just about Buy sell Ads and Dig. There was also a discussion about another outlay called Pando, but it was had a lot of Dig in it. This article published back on October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, so it's a few years old now, and according to those unnamed former Dig employees, the technology team at DIG was essentially let go upon the conclusion of this deal, So the whole tech team at Dig is gone. Some of them would actually end up being hired on by a blockchain focused journalism marketplace that was called Civil. Unfortunately for them, Civil would give up the ghost two years later in twenty twenty. It shut down after the leadership team at Civil determined that the business was just not sustainable, particularly in the wake of a massive decline in the blockchain slash crypto industry. By sell Ads reportedly absorbed the DIG sales team and the business side of the staff into its own operations, so they essentially said, all right, we're going to bring you in as buy sell Ads team members, not specifically DIG team members. Out of the editorial staff, things were pretty rough. Within a year of the deal being announced, a general manager, two full time original content editors, and a video editor were all laid off from DIG. Others who had been working in an editorial capacity left on their own, and when Barbera wrote her article for digitay back in twenty nineteen, she said the entire editorial staff at dig at that point consisted of five full time employees and one part time staff member. That was essentially what was left of dig. Okay, We're going to take another quick break. When I come back, I'll wrap up this update on what's been going on with dig Okay, So we're back. Uh. I was talking about how Digg's staff was whittled down after the acquisition when Bisellads bought a majority stake in the company. But as for DIG itself. It still exists. Dig dot com is a website you can go and you can visit it. The site posts new art articles on a regular basis. I checked. I was making sure because I mean, sometimes you go to these things and you're like, oh, there's a ton of articles here, and then you click through and you're like, oh, this was posted like eighteen months ago. That's not the case with Dig. There are a lot of new articles on the various categories that Dig covers, which includes again stuff like news and gaming and sports. Based on the bylines that I saw, to me, at least, it looks like there's a pretty small editorial staff in place. There. There might be a couple of freelancers who write for Dig, but mostly I'm just seeing the same names pop up over and over again. It also looks to me that they are mostly referencing news items that are posted elsewhere, like maybe it's a press release, or in some cases they're referencing a news article that went on some other media outlet. That is not to cast shade on them, right, I'm not saying they're doing a bad job because they're going to other news sites and saying this article over here says blah blah blah. Lots of outlets out there do this. Business Insider does this all the time. You'll go there and they'll say, like Reuter's Reports or Fast Company Reports or whatever. I also can't imagine that any of the staff on Dig's editorial group has an opportunity to do any sort of investigative journalism. I don't think that they have the time to do that, because from what I see, it looks like a lot of them are posting multiple articles per day, and at that level of output, you don't have time to do things like take extra steps and really do investigative work. It's just impossible if you have an output quota that you need to meet. Clearly, Dig does not resemble what it used to be when it was first launched, not by a long shot. But that raises another question, how is it doing as far as performance goes. That's a great question. It's also a question that's very hard to answer, largely because third party web traffic analytics are not what I would call accurate or even reliable. So let me give you a pair of examples supposedly about DIG. This kind of illustrates why it's hard to get insight into how well a website is doing unless you have direct access to internal analytics. So if I search for digs web traffic analytics on like Google and I pull up a couple of different firms, I can get very different information. And in fact I did do this, So one of the companies I looked at was sem Rush sem Rush, and using sem Rush, I'm told that the most recent number of monthly visitors to dig dot com was eight point nine million. That that was for like August. Eight point nine million monthly users isn't terrible, it is still a fraction of what digsaw back in its glory days, and sam Rush ranks the site as being eleven two and twenty seven by web traffic in the world or twenty eight hundred nineteenth in the United States. Further, it says the average person who's visitingdig dot com sticks around for around eight and a half minutes per visit, and that there is a bounce rate of fifty six point h four percent, which means slightly more than half of the people who visit dig navigate away immediately. Like they come to dig dot com, they take a look and then they go somewhere else, and that the other slightly less than half are the ones who are sticking around and apparently spending eight and a half minutes on the site. But let's say we hop over to a competing web analytics service called similar web. Well, then we get some very different information. So similar web marks the bounce straight at fifty four point one seven percent. Now that's actually pretty darn close to sem rush, right. Sem Rush said fifty six point oh four. Similar web says fifty four point one point seven. That's close enough where you could say, oh, there's probably some margin of error that accounts for this discrepancy. That's not too bad. But sem rush says the most recent monthly analytics had eight point nine million visitors. Similar web says, no, no, no, it's four point one million visitors. That's less than half of what sem rush said. That is a huge discrepancy. There's no margin of error that's gonna say greater than fifty percent. You do be useless to use the tool. If there's a greater than fifty percent margin of error, why use the tool at all? You don't have any idea what the real answer is. So, yeah, four point one million monthly visitors, according to one web analytics site and eight point nine million. According to another these do not line up. Moreover, sam Rush said the average person would stick around for eight and a half minutes, right, Well, similar Web says no, no, no, it's two and a half minutes. So again huge discrepancy here. So you see, I can't really draw any conclusions about how dig is doing as far as performance and web traffic goes. I can't even say with any confidence that the site gets somewhere between four million and nine million visitors per month, because when you've got a discrepancy that that's big, how can you draw any conclusion whatsoever. I do think it is safe to say that whatever dig is seeing in monthly traffic, it is not close to what it was before the disastrous rollout of dig version four. I also mentioned that I would get back to saying something about buy sell ads. Now, before I get into any of this, there's some disclaimers I need to make. I have to stress the information I saw is based off a a very very small number of reviews for the company from supposed customers of buy sell ads. And we should also remember that the people who are most likely to post ads are the ones who have had a negative experience. It is much more rare for someone who had a positive experience to just say that everything went smoothly, unless it was a truly positive experience, in which case then they might leave a review. So I don't want this to come across as anything close to a definitive overview of buy sell Ads. What I will say is the trust Pilot score for buy sell ads is in the gutter. It is at one point nine out of a possible five. Ninety three percent of the reviews are one star. But again this is for a very very small number of reviews. There are just fourteen reviews on trust Pilot about buy sell Ads. The reviews do reference similar complaints. So on the publisher side, one review claimed that they signed up for service with bisell ads, received a notification about an advertiser wanting to post an AD to the site, and so they then approved the ad. Like that's how it works, right. Buysell ads matches advertisers to the sites, says they're offering to publish an AD on your site, yay or nay, and this person said yay. Then they said that they saw by sell ads had been canceling some of the agreed upon ad deals that they had agreed on this ad deal. The ad maybe ran for a while, but then got canceled early on, and the reason sited was fraud. Then they found out that their entire site was removed from buy sell ads marketplace because it quote unquote attracts fraud. Now, if we assume that this is an honest review, which is a big assumption already, this obviously raises flags because it was by sell Ads that was sending the ad offers to the public sure in the first place. So presumably, if there are any issues with fraud, Buy sell ads should have an obligation to find that out and prevent it from getting to this stage. If the publisher is just approving opportunities that buy sell ads is presenting to them, how is the publisher responsible for the ads if those ads are actually fraudulent. But again, this is all assuming the review itself is honest. Other reviews came in from the advertising side, with several people saying they had engaged buy sell ads to place ads in various campaigns, only to find the campaign account shut down after a short amount of time, and then they were trying desperately to get a refund on the ad campaign because the campaign would be shut down prematurely, their own account would get shut down, and yet they would have been charged for the service. And the ads often mentioned that getting in touch with customer service at buy sell ads was practically impossible. But again, this is just fourteen reviews. That is far too small a number to even remotely call it a sample size, and it could very well be that none of those reviews are entirely honest or accurate, or even remotely so I think it's only fair to point out that if you were to go to a site like G two dot com, there are just twelve reviews for by sell ads there. But those twelve reviews create an aggregate score of three point eight out of five, which isn't stellar, but it's way better than one point nine at trust pilot. Right. So again, a lot of the reviews that are on G two dot com are actually four or five star reviews. There's one was like a no star review which brought the average down, and in fact, I think it may have been one of the same people who left a review over at trust pilot. So I can't make any real conclusion about by sell ads. There's just too little data. There's no way to tell whether or not people like it or don't like it. There's just not that much information, and part of that, I think is because it's still a relatively small company. But that's the update on Dig and its current corporate overlord. I think about Dig the same way I think about MySpace, because technically there is still a site that's still Dig, but it doesn't remotely resemble what it used to be, and it has a fraction of the mind share that it once commanded. Like, I don't think people talk about Dig anymore unless they're like, hey, do you remember when everyone was using dig? That's the context they use that in. I wouldn't go so far to say that Dig's grave has been dug, because trust me, there's no shortage of articles out there that have a similar pun to them. But I will say Dig is not even close to what it used to be, and I have no reason to expect that to change in the foreseeable future. Maybe there'll be another change in ownership of Dig in the future that brings it back to this more democratized approach as what Dig was when it first launched. But unless you can do that and also find a way to generate revenue so that you know you could pay for the whole thing. It may be a non starter because if the only thing you can do is seek out endless rounds of venture capital funding, sooner or later that gravy train is going to come to an end and you'll be really stuck. I think a lot of Dig's problems actually came out of the fact that the company was looking for ways to monetize in a way that would be sustainable, and unfortunately a lot of those ways were in conflict with the very features that the community valued, and that was really a problem. We've see this over and over. Right. Twitter is the same way we saw a lot with Twitter, where the things that people valued with Twitter were things that weren't easily monetizable, and the ways to monetize Twitter were things that rubbed people the wrong way. And that's continuing today as Twitter has transformed into x. So. Yeah, not an unusual story when it comes to web startups. Anyway. That's the update on Dig. Not much else I can say of any real substance. I would love to learn more about it, and maybe I'll reach out to some of the people who are, you know, apparently writing articles for Dig just to kind of get an idea of what it's like, because you know, it could very well be that everyone there is incredibly happy. Based upon the output, I would imagine it's got to be pretty stressful. I remember when I was writing an article a day and how that was really putting a large stress on me. I mean, I do a podcast a day pretty much here, and that is pretty stressful. I can't imagine doing multiple ones a day. That would be pretty tough. Anyway, that's the update. I hope you are all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.