Kevin Rose to Digg users: This is getting personal

Digg is growing. They now have about $30 million dollars stuffed into a mattress somewhere in San Francisco (also called "funding"), or one buck per user. The catch: they only know about 3 million of their 30 million visitors by name. 27 million of them don't actually have an account. They are drive-bys, feeding at the Digg trough.

Kevin Rose, talking about future direction at the Future of Web Apps conference in London (as reported by Caroline McCarthy over at The Social), says that needs to change, and he is championing personalization and socialization. I talked about this recently in a post about how Digg should spend their money.

Drive-by clicks are great for ad revenue, not so great for long-term stability as a company. The ultimate answer, according to Rose, is to get users to register and then form small communities around their interests. McCarthy makes a good point about the strategy of catering to elite users, those who seem to drive the most traffic, leading to biases.

I think, for Digg, the best strategy is to make every user elite - once each individual is registered and contributing (aka, Digging) the site becomes much stronger, it can leverage itself and scale. One example: let's say you get a bunch of people who like the band Red Umbrella. That's really specific, it's personal. People like that band for specific reasons. It could be a fairly small group of fans, but each one is important. There's an obvious long tail concept here, but in this case from a social networking standpoint.

Now, when one of the few hundred or many thousands of people who like Red Umbrella finds a new band, or a new streaming media service, you pay attention. When one of the 3 million elite users digs about something, it gets attention, but it's not personal - it has not scaled for you, just for the millions of non-registered users.

So what does that mean for long-term stability? The drive-bys can move on to Me.dium or some other site, but the cloistered users will stay - they are hooked. They actually found other people who like Red Umbrella, and that takes a lot of work, so they are staying!

For Digg, it means targeted advertising and, maybe even more importantly, easier funding. Registered users are loyal, you can communicate with them, they click on ads. FaceBook has 100 million registered users - that is some serious scale! Digg, you next?