Digg founder Kevin Rose said yesterday that the site is not yet profitable, and that’s OK. “We could slap on lots of ads, and we could be profitable tomorrow,” Rose said, explaining that Digg is going to taking its time, guard the user experience and keep it fresh and light. “We have a path to profitability,” he said. How refreshing. This strategy flies in the face of traditional media’s short-term ROI demands for new projects — which is often bent on exploiting the user experience, not cultivating it — and it explains why startup companies will always have an edge with online innovation. That is, unless traditional media companies begin to empower their most creative people to create new products in highly flexible environments with respectable R&D budgets and no hard deadlines. Yeah, right.
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