digg-logoDigg posted an interesting announcement today indicating some changes they will be making this year to try and reach profitability in their company.

“As we’ve often stated over the past couple of months, given the current economic climate, we’ve made the decision to take a more conservative approach to our expansion plans and aggressively focus on reaching profitability within the year.”

After their failure to sell Digg to Google last year and their company’s valuation taking a huge hit, it does not come as much of a surprise that they have to do something drastic to keep their investors happy.

As many companies are being forced to do, Digg also announced they will be letting employees go who are not critical to the years profitability goals. It is reported by the New York Times that the cut is to be 10% of their 75 person workforce.

What is really interesting is that they will be hiring a direct sales team.

Digg has for some time had an outreach program, in which they would partner with popular websites to get them to put Digg buttons on their site.

forbes-digg

However, this is the first time where they have announced a serious effort and team dedicated to sales and partnerships.

Digg also announced it’s major priorities for the coming year, which of course, are completely focused on increasing pageviews and profits.

  • Rolling out new features to grow and engage our community
  • Building on our advertising infrastructure
  • Building on our successful partnership with Microsoft
  • Ongoing sponsorship opportunities
  • Ongoing publisher and trade partnerships

Unfortunately for Digg members, this announcement means more of the same. It means that the issues raised about the current features are likely to continue to be ignored. (Digg: Where is the forum to debate issues that you promised us forever ago?)

It is interesting to point out that Reddit on the other hand, has actually hired two more employees, bringing them to a grand total of 7 people. Well 6.5 actually, as one of the guys is only part-time.

{{{"type":"anchor", "ring":"0", "page":"0"}}}