Dig's Billion-Dollar Collapse
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Sam Parr shares a story about the dramatic fall of Digg, a once-prominent social news website.
"Digg and Reddit were competitors, and for a long time Digg was beating Reddit. They were both 'front page of the internet' type businesses with tens of millions of monthly uniques. Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, was on the cover of Time as Silicon Valley's new wunderkind - the guy who was 28 years old and worth $1 billion. He was like the next Mark Zuckerberg.
Digg ended up not winning this battle and they're currently for sale. Someone sent me their financials on Twitter. Over the last year they had 27 million users, about 2 million a month, which isn't a lot - The Hustle gets more than 2 million a month just on our website and we don't even try to get traffic.
Their revenue for the year was only around $1.2-1.3 million, with monthly revenue of just $70-90,000. Horrible. The gap between how much we talked about them and their prestige versus where they actually are in reality is huge."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.