Digg traffic tanks after launch of Betaworks V1

Normally when a website relaunches after a drastic change, particularly after a buyout as Digg was purchased by Betaworks last month, there is a bump in traffic from the buzz surrounding the launch as well as the curious former users who had left the site long before. The exact opposite occurred for Digg when Betaworks launched V1 on July 31st according to traffic tracking site Alexa.

The site was down for several hours in the morning as they migrated causing some of the traffic loss, but it should have been followed by a spike in traffic enough to bring it above where it was the previous days. It did not. Traffic, reach, and all of the important numbers continued to stay lower than before even during the full day of August 1st when there was no registered down time. In fact, the only number that went up was bounce rate.

Much of this can be attributed to the disastrous decision to dump all 14+ million pages of content that had been accumulated over the years. These pages still ranked well in Google, particularly for timely searches.

In essence, Betaworks paid for a domain that was getting good traffic to act as a launching point for their platform. Unfortunately, many of the people who have been visiting Digg over the years will not like what they see as their accounts have been destroyed. Now, there are no true Digg accounts – one must log in with Facebook to be able to cast a Digg. Buries are gone as well.

Digg was clearly sick, dying a slow death. Betaworks simply pulled the plug and replaced the decaying body with a Google News wannabe.