In July 2012, Digg — once the most powerful social bookmarking site on the internet — was sold off in pieces at a fire sale. It was a moment that should have been a wake-up call for every online entrepreneur. A platform that had been the center of the blogging universe just a few years earlier was suddenly worthless. If it could happen to Digg, it could happen to anything.<\/p>\n
For those who were not around for it, Digg was the Facebook Like button before Facebook existed. Getting your content to the front page of Digg could crash your server with traffic. Bloggers spent enormous amounts of time and energy cultivating Digg votes. Entire link building strategies revolved around social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon.<\/p>\n
Then it all collapsed. Digg made a series of bad redesign decisions, users fled, and the platform that had seemed permanent turned out to be temporary. Slashdot, another traffic giant, faded into irrelevance around the same time. The lesson was brutal and clear: no platform is forever.<\/p>\n
Back in high school in the 1980s, I discovered Zig Ziglar through a girlfriend's father who was in sales. Zig's core principle changed the trajectory of my life: “You can get almost anything you want in life if you will just help enough people get what they want.” That idea is the foundation of everything I teach about internet marketing.<\/p>\n
It applies directly to the Digg story. The marketers who built their businesses around gaming Digg's algorithm lost everything when the platform died. The marketers who focused on creating genuine value — helping real people solve real problems — survived because their value existed independent of any single platform.<\/p>\n
When Digg collapsed, I started asking a question that seemed radical at the time: Is Google forever? I had already watched Yahoo go from dominant to irrelevant. MySpace went from essential to abandoned. Every platform that seemed permanent turned out to be temporary.<\/p>\n
Google has obviously proven more durable than Digg or MySpace. But the principle still holds. Google changes its algorithm more than once per day on average. Every algorithm update can wipe out traffic to sites that were dependent on specific ranking strategies. The businesses that survive these changes are the ones that are not dependent on Google alone.<\/p>\n
Here is what the social bookmarking era teaches us about building businesses that last:<\/p>\n
One of the traps that the constantly shifting platform landscape creates is what Gary Vaynerchuk calls the Yes Virus. Every time a new platform emerges, there is pressure to jump on it immediately. Every time someone pitches you an opportunity, the temptation is to say yes. But saying yes to everything means you never go deep on anything.<\/p>\n
Gary grew his company by learning to say no to things. That discipline freed him to focus on the things that actually mattered. For part-time internet marketers especially, focus is everything. You do not have unlimited hours. Every yes to something new is a no to something you are already working on.<\/p>\n
Social bookmarking died. Digg is a footnote in internet history. MySpace is a punchline. Yahoo search is a memory. And yet, the entrepreneurs who focused on building real value, owning their audience, and diversifying their traffic are still here, still thriving. The platforms are just tools. Your business has to be bigger than any single tool.<\/p>\n