Digg: The rise of individual strength

Individual company portrait: Because of the low-cost operation of online work, these outsourcing opportunities will be more and more adept at using the Internet, "individual companies" to obtain, so also hatched a large number of small enterprises.

Similar species: Hao123, Flavorpill, Flickr

Kevin Ross, founder of the hottest tech news aggregation website Digg.com, protested in his weekly video blog: Kerkenis and AOL are "suppressing Digg."

The first thing he was referring to was the two weeks before the third edition of Digg, the US Netscape launched a competitive product. Netscape was founded by Silicon Valley star Kerkenis, who earlier provided Kerkenis with a $5 million worth of purchase contract. The deal would have left Ross out of control and was therefore rejected. The second is July 18, 2006, the US online poaching Digg, lured by 1000 of dollars a month to the former 50 contributors, but the effect is poor.

And even more surprisingly, there are only 16 employees in a company that is seen by big companies as a rival and is being suppressed. However, in Europe and the United States, Digg company is not a case.

Flickr, a 2.5 million-member photo-store, has millions of of its content and website built, bought by Yahoo for more than 20 million dollars, and less than 10 people with real pay.

Flavorpill, a publication site that was founded 6 years ago and published in 5 cities on two continents, and about 300,000 people a week, employs only 8 full-time employees.

China also has many of these wonders. Hao123 site webmaster Li Xingping, he only junior high school culture, Guangdong Meizhou New Town people, to the farthest place is Shenzhen. But he founded the home of the Hao Web site, Alexa Global website traffic ranked 25th, more than most of the domestic famous portal. His talent lies in the precise and subtle grasp of the needs of the novice-level netizens, which coincides with the current situation of Chinese netizens. So a small Li xingping, and giant Baidu stood on the same platform dialogue. Baidu bought the Hao123 with 11.9 million yuan plus 40,000 shares of sky-high prices. The most interesting thing is that Baidu took over after the discovery of a drop in traffic, had to re-hiring Li Xingping, to manage Hao123 again.

Entry threshold low, individual companies started "the war"

Why are traditional big companies so afraid of such a novice, why they copied the Digg model with huge capital did not play its role, the attack also failed?

Because it is easy for small businesses to get the knowledge and technology to start websites, they are likely to spread anywhere in the world, big companies have no clear enemies, and war has lost its target.

Looking back, we'll see how Digg has risen.

Kevin Ross started the digg.com Web site with less than 2000 dollars in start-up funds. In the fall of 2004, he spent 1500 dollars to ask his friend Owen Byrne for Web site development, also found a monthly 99 dollars of server space, and finally left only one of the biggest cost: domain name. He paid 1200 dollars to the owner of the digg.com domain. Finally, they launched the site on December 5, 2004.

That's why individual companies are rising: the barriers to entry are so low that only a laptop and a $50 a month of access costs can make a kid the next big thing.

At the end of the 1990, the fixed cost of servers, storage devices and software was high. But for now, hardware costs have been falling. 5 years ago, a server with hundreds of G storage capacity (one of the many devices used to handle user uploads) spent about 250,000 dollars on Flickr. Today, you can get a memory of thousands of G in a 5000 dollar price.

Secondly, the popularity of the Open source network construction module such as MySQL and PHP, enable the entrepreneur to use the free Open Source Network tool in the spare time, easy to establish the complex website and the service.

Real users, virtual employees

There are only 8 people in the Flavorpill, less than 10 people flickr,16 Digg, these companies have such a small number of employees, how the business is carried out, how the project operation?

Relying on user-generated content is a typical feature of Digg. Digg currently has only 16 employees, mostly in technical work, while the 600,000 users registered on their Web site are equivalent to the site's editors.

Unlike traditional news sites, Digg makes good use of people's curiosity, allowing netizens to share their cool news sources with others, with 95% of news sources and news rankings derived from user selection. In addition to the openness and transparency of the content, the effective use of competition among users is also one of the key factors for Digg's success. This ranking does not depend entirely on how many stories you have dug up for Digg, but on the feedback that other users have about the news when they are introduced.

Now, many network services are using this kind of group strength, WEB2.0 has the highly autonomous organization, the socialization characteristic, does not need like the traditional Sina, Sohu, Tencent so many staff.

Rapid rise, impossible to guard against

Why in the past times, the traditional big company can unified the lake, and maintain a long-term status? The reason is the stable and mature development environment, large companies can rely on a strong capital, long-term experience accumulation and huge loyal users with the emerging generations to fight a war of attrition. But at a time of rapid change, speed has gone beyond the scale and become an important determinant of the future.

Digg.com as the world's first excavation site. Founded just two years, the number of users and access to a straight rise, has become a popular public website in the United States. Digg is now ranked as the 24th public site in the United States, is approaching the New York Times (19th), easily defeated Fox News Network. and claiming that its independent IP day visits up to 1.5 million times, the number of registered users reached 600,000. More than 1 million people gather in Digg to read, comment and "digging" more than 4,000 news a day.

The extremely high flow rate and the development speed firmly grasped the media and the investor's eye. That's why Digg gets as much money as a magnet. At the end of October last year, there was growing news that several companies, including News Corp, had shown a strong interest in Digg, which industry insiders believe could be worth 200 million of dollars.

Compared with Digg, in July 2006, MySpace surpassed the world's largest traditional portal, Yahoo, and Google, the world's largest search engine, to become America's first-largest site. Even more surprising is its profit myth, which took less than two years from broke, which was created in 2003, to Press Corp to spend 580 million of billions of dollars on acquisitions.

Distributed operations, incubators for individual companies

Whether it's Digg or Flickr, why do Web2.0 companies integrate users into their virtual employees?

In the internet era, a lot of work is digitized, completely do not need the involvement of logistics, the use of distributed can be completed. These "individual companies" tend to use their homes as offices and operate on the Internet.

The form of supply chain under the Internet is creating more and more outsourcing business, and in this process, due to the low-cost operation of online work, these outsourcing opportunities will be more and more good at using the Internet, "personal companies" to obtain, so also hatched a large number of small enterprises.