Digg Getting Serious about Making Money [Layoffs]

Jay Adelson posted a short note to the Digg company blog today asserting that they were now “aggressively focused on reaching profitability within the year.”

It doesn’t take too much reading between the lines in his missive to get the impression that there might be some headcount reduction in the works over at Digg.

This means we’ll probably see a radical change to the aggressive goals and probably less responsiveness to the issues raised at the regular Digg Town Hall meetings, less focus on community and feature management, and more focus on how ads are placed and what deals are made to make the bills.

It’s important for them to focus now on not only how to get ads on their site, since that’s (at least for the next year) going to be a diminishing source of important revenue, and more focused on how the content continually generated by the site might be resold to other news sources.

It might also be a decent time to assess other intellectual assets created by the site.  The focused bounce of traffic generated by an organic Digg event is no small thing, and while there’s generally a great deal of controversy around the topic of sponsored posts, every other news organization does it (even other aggregators like TechMeme).

It might now be time for Digg to look at being a bit less hippie and a bit more capitalist, in other words.