Will Larson: belief

Transcript context

…Do you think Digg could have made it? There was a world where Digg would've been a hugely successful business or do you think it was just way too late and it's the wrong product? The thing that really killed Digg is the change. It wasn't SEO driven. So monetization was from ads. Well, many companies including Digg claimed that it was the first in kind of stream, in feed like advertising company where Twitter has ads within the tweets or Facebook does. But Digg did that before Facebook or Twitter really innovated the ad format. But the vast majority of monetization was on these... We call them permalink pages, which is page 40. Then article we crawled and the vast majority of traffic for that was driven by Google search. And so there was an SEO change, which really is the thing that started creating the urgency for us to launch this migration. SEO changed, traffic started going down, monetization was driven by that. And so we were already on fire by the time we tried to launch this. But I do think that I still want something like what Digg was trying to become today. Social news based on like what my friends are actually reading and liking merged with a global index of similar users who are interested in similar topics. It's still a product that I think Google Reader has some kind of similar components to it. These are both interesting products solving interesting problems that have not for whatever reason been successful as businesses. And I do think there's a gap there still, but there's a lot of people trying unsuccessfully to fill it and there must be a reason why people struggle to fill it despite so many people trying. Awesome. Will, is there anything else you want to share or leave people with before we get to our very fast lightning round because I know you have to run in about five minutes?…

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