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Kevin Rose of Digg: The Most Famous Man on the Internet

Digg founder Kevin Rose is having so much fun, you could almost miss the fact that he's setting himself up to be an Internet-age media mogul.

Gregg Segal

From a distance, it looks like a rock concert: a gritty part of the Brooklyn, New York, waterfront, where dive bars and cavernous clubs provide a backdrop for an endless parade of girls in skinny jeans and guys piloting fixed-gear bikes. On an evening in June, trickling into one of the unmarked doorways is a massive throng of young people. They are loud, obscene, and drunk with enthusiasm -- clapping, hooting, and bouncing up and down in place. Outside this dance club -- a massive box of bricks called Studio B -- a line wraps around the block for several hundred feet.

Something big is about to happen, but it's not a concert. The crowd is almost exclusively male, and there's a disproportionate share of khaki. The warm-up acts are a spiky-haired magician and a guy who attempts to pump up the crowd with exhortations like, "How many of you watch video on hand-held devices?" Yet somehow, the audience is eating it up, cheering every time someone mentions Apple, Twitter, or anything remotely technical. What we have is a gathering of iPhone-coveting, micro-blogging, honest-to-goodness geeks -- roughly 1,300 of them -- and they are all here to see Kevin Rose. He's the spokesperson for a new generation of entrepreneurs and the envy of pretty much everyone who dreams of making it big in technology.

Sometime around 7 o'clock, a cab pulls up, and out pops Rose. He's 31 years old, sturdily built and 6 feet tall, with a youthful mop of hair, wearing a tight black T-shirt. He has a small entourage in tow.

"Kevin," a loud male voice calls in the flat moo peculiar to frat boys and those pretending to be frat boys. Rose beams and strikes the kind of pose that only celebrities can pull off -- half a wave, half a shading of the eyes from camera flashes. "Keeevviin," another voice pleads. "Keeeevviiiin," as he disappears inside the club.

Several minutes later, Rose takes the stage for a taping of an online television show called Diggnation. The show is produced by Revision3, a company that Rose co-founded in 2005, and it was inspired by the wildly popular website Digg.com, another Rose creation. Digg is sometimes described as an online newspaper or a social search engine, but it feels more like a seedy bar that happens to serve news. Digg allows its visitors, mostly young men, to submit links to newsworthy items -- blog postings, images, newspaper articles, or online videos -- and write their own headlines and teasers. The stories, which frequently involve technology, scantily clad women, or Ron Paul, are automatically posted to the site and then put to a vote. A story with enough votes, or "diggs," lands on the homepage, bringing glory to the user who submitted it and torrents of traffic to the website that posted the original content. (Web marketers call this the Digg effect. It is powerful enough to catapult a site to the mainstream and even take down a company's servers in a matter of hours.)

If Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) imagines the Internet as an orderly place governed by clean lines, Stanford math, and general good sense, Digg embraces the chaos of mob rule. It is a place where serious business news -- "U.S. Government Helping to Arrange Sale of Lehman Brothers" (587 diggs on a recent afternoon) -- appears alongside what can only be described as trash -- "Dad Chases Nude Boy From Daughter's Room With Pipe" (2,557 diggs). There may be something disquieting about the fact that a website like this attracts roughly 30 million visitors each month -- twice the traffic of the website of The Wall Street Journal -- but it's evidence that Rose is onto something big. Digg has been the continual subject of acquisition rumors for the past three years, and Rose has found himself in meetings with Barry Diller, Al Gore, and Rupert Murdoch. No one can agree exactly how much Digg is worth, but valuations range from $60 million to $300 million. That makes Rose, who maintains a substantial equity stake, a very rich man.

A rich man with a TV show. For about 40 minutes every week, Rose and a bespectacled co-host named Alex Albrecht sit on a couch holding their laptops, consume several beers each, and discuss the top stories on Digg. As usual, the news value is questionable, and the show plays like a parody of a lad magazine. Tonight's topics include a review of the world's most innovative brothels, the best add-on for the Firefox Web browser, and a story of a geek whose wife forced him to organize his DVD collection. "My friends, marriage only leads to terrible things like this" is Rose's take on that story.