Former Yahoo! Mail product marketing director Tom Shin has been hired to lead a renewed sales effort at Digg, according to a report tonight by Erik Schonefeld at TechCrunch.
Schonefeld points to Shinn's executive bio that says Yahoo Mail grew from $20 million in revenues to $300 million during his seven-year tenure. TechCrunch doesn't name a source, so we presume it came from their own hard earned investigative research.
Can Shinn turn Digg from a money pit into a money maker? With 30 million monthly visitors, a paradigm shaking social news model and now a world class ad sales leader, if Digg can't turn a profit then much of this new "economy" online may be in trouble.
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Let's all hope that he can figure out how to make Digg some money! I for one believe this new economy is the only thing keeping a lot of people employed right now. The new economy while suffering the downturn that everyone feels is still plugging along with optimism and new ideas. The only question is will these new ideas have enough time to grow, or rather will they have enough funding to give them enough time to grow into something special like the Google, MySpace, Facebook etc that came out of the last downturns?
Rex
Posted by: Rex
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January 27, 2009 6:22 PM
I don't think a salesperson is going to help that much as I think Digg has more systemic problems. The main challenge digg has is to scale a community that is primarily controlled by a couple of hundred users and has created a culture that rejects newcomers.
IMHO Digg should research more on how to grow a community in a sustainable way, provide leadership, and put mechanisms in place to grow and reward leaders from the community. Then they would have a more sustainable model IMHO.
http://twitter.com/karllong
Posted by: Karl Long | January 27, 2009 6:23 PM