Jay Adelson, Digg.com CEO and one of its co-founders, has announced in a post on his blog that the famous news aggregator will take a more conservative approach to its expansion plans and aggressively focus on reaching profitability within 2009.

 

Also, Adelson announced “headcount reduction in certain areas”. Speaking with Rafe Needleman from Webware, Jay Adelson explained about 10 percent of Digg staff will be fired, but a new sales team will be hired.  

 

“….we’ll be taking proactive measures to manage our costs including a headcount reduction in certain areas that are less core to this year’s objectives while continuing to hire for roles that will help build on our leadership position and get us to profitability faster. This includes hiring a direct sales team, in addition to other targeted hires in 2009,” Adelson noted on his blog.

 

Digg.com, which started as a pet project of Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson, was officially launched in December 2005.

The website, which can be best described as a social networking site focused on news, has grow rapidly and by 2008 it has attracted close to 236 million visitors annually.According to Adelson, Digg has more than 35 million community members.

 

In order to monetize its traffic, in July 2007 Digg.com signed with Microsoft an advertising deal thanks to which the Redmond giant has become the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on the popular news site.

 

In order to display ads on Digg.com, Microsoft uses its own ad platform, called AdCenter, which is very similar to Google’s AdWords. Last year there were several rumors that Google might acquire Digg.com for $200 million. However, Google later denied the rumors.