Digg Reader

» see digg.com/reader as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

on 13 march 2013 google announced that google reader would be shut down on 1 july 2013. the RSS-reading population of the internet spent the next three months arguing about where to migrate. betaworks, which had bought the wreckage of digg in july 2012 and rebuilt the site from scratch, made a public commitment on 20 march 2013: they would ship an rss reader before google's deadline. they gave themselves fourteen weeks.

they hit it. digg reader launched on 28 june 2013, three days before google reader went off. the web app and iOS version shipped together. an android version followed in august. the OPML import worked. the folder structure survived migration. the interface was cleaner than google reader's had been at the end.

i was on google reader during those years. when the shutdown notice went up i tried digg reader alongside feedly. i stayed on feedly, which had the smoother mobile sync and had been in the RSS business for longer. digg reader felt correct but not sticky. that was probably the story with most of its early users.

~ the case file ~

~ the replacement scramble ~

the google reader deadline created a small ecosystem all at once. digg reader launched in june. AOL reader launched in june (killed in june 2017). feedly retooled from a google-reader front end to its own backend in march. inoreader was already running out of bulgaria and picked up serious traction that summer. the old reader kept plodding along. newsblur and feedbin joined as paid-tier options.

digg reader was interesting as a positioning play. betaworks used it to keep digg relevant during a rebuild period, and to reinforce the story that the new digg cared about the same power users who had cared about the old digg. it never had to be a profitable line item on its own, because it was carrying the brand.

~ how it ended ~

on 5 march 2018 digg announced that reader would shut down on 26 march 2018. the stated reason was resources: keeping an rss reader alive with a small team was not where they wanted the engineering budget going. users were given three weeks to export their OPML.

the timing was suspicious. in april 2018, weeks after reader went dark, buysellads acquired digg's core assets from betaworks. the reader was pointedly not part of what buysellads picked up. it read like a sunset done deliberately before the sale so the buyer would not have to inherit it.

~ the long tail ~

feedly, inoreader, the old reader and newsblur are all still running in 2026, which is longer than the original google reader era lasted. RSS as a category is smaller than it was, but the surviving readers have real subscribers and real revenue, which is more than any of them had in the summer of 2013 when the migration wave started.

the pattern that got established that summer is the pattern that still holds. the platforms come and go. the OPML file survives every one of them. anyone who kept their subscription list across the last thirteen years has moved it through three or four homes and lost nothing except the read/unread state.

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