Digg, the popular social news site, is to expand around the world in different languages, Kevin Rose, its founder and chief architect, told The Times.

The company, which last month announced it had raised $28.7 million in a new round of venture funding, has ambitious plans to take on copycat sites in Europe and the Far East.

News stories and other content on Digg are submitted by the site’s visitors, who also vote for the stories they like. The submissions with the most votes are posted on the site’s homepage, which represents a snapshot of the most popular online stories among the Digg community at any one time.


The site was founded by Mr Rose and others in 2004, initially focusing on technology stories. Bringing in other categories has rapidly driven traffic up.

Mr Rose, 31, said: “We are making plans to expand internationally. There are other sites out there and we are seeing how much traction they are getting.”

He said that 45 per cent of the traffic to digg.com was from overseas. London had the most people contributing to the site, he added, more than any US city.

He said the company, which is moving to bigger offices in San Francisco and almost doubling its staff to about 150 people in the next six months, hoped to start rolling out localised foreign sites by the end of 2009.

He said that sites similar to Digg were gaining popularity in countries like Germany, Japan and Spain.

“We want to evolve the existing site and we are making progress with our international plans,” he said.

Traffic to Digg has doubled in the last year to more than 30 million unique visitors per month.

Reports have suggested that both Microsoft and Google were interested in buying Digg earlier this year, but any takeover plans have come to nothing.

Digg now appears set on an independent course. The $28.7 million round of series C funding was led by Highland Capital Partners and includes previous Digg investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital.

Mr Rose said his top priority was to improve the experience for users by developing a better recommendation engine, which would help users find content for their niche interests. He said the homepage would remain, but that Digg wanted to give users a more customised view.

“We want to make the site more personal,” he said. “If you Digg something we want to connect you to the people who are agreeing with you,” he said.

He also wanted to find ways of showing users the impact that they have by Digging a story – i.e. voting for it.

“Rather than just adding one to the number of Diggs per story, we want to show how many people you have spread the story to,” he said.

After telling the Future of Web Apps conference in London that his company was hiring new staff, Mr Rose said that things were going to get really tough in Silicon Valley because of the economic crash.

Start-ups and firms looking for second rounds of funding were going to find cash very hard to find, he told The Times.

Mature start-ups would have to consolidate and find ways to get profitable because companies looking to buy them out would only be paying “pennies in the dollar”, he said.