Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 14:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
A Google acquisition of Digg for at least US $200m is being rumoured,
but the big questions revolve around whether such an acquisition could
be the death of Digg, or a new era of Digg dominating the community
news voting sector.
Digg. It’s a place where anyone can go to submit interesting news and information they’ve found online on virtually any topic, and then have it voted on by readers. The more Diggs a story gets, the more likely it will end up on the front page, to be seen by millions of loyal daily Diggers.
Getting your site “Dugg”, or listed on the Digg front page, is a guarantee of a tsunami of traffic to your site, and if your web host isn’t up to it, a guarantee that your site could well go down.
So far, Digg has made much of its money from a three year advertising deal with Microsoft, but it also hosts all manner of banner ads like any other modern site on the Internet, and there has always been a question over whether someone would want to acquire Digg.
Why? Because it has tons of loyal visitors, and as happened with Flickr and numerous other “web 2.0 or social media” sites online, bigger companies are keen to see some of that action happening under their own banners, with Microsoft being at least one previous potential suitor, he
Now comes the news from
TechCrunch that the on-again, off-again negotiations between Google and Digg are back on, even though TechCrunch notes that Digg’s CEO previously “vigourously denied” any negotiations were taking place.
TechCrunch says that “final negotiations” are on, with “major points” agreed on, but any deal is at least “a couple of weeks away” and “could still fall apart” with Microsoft potentially “willing to step back in for a much lower price”.
All of this raises several questions over whether or not such an acquisition is good for Digg and its users.
Presumably a $200m buyout is fantastic for Digg’s shareholders, but will the Google factor help Digg scale new heights of Internet stardom, or dig it down into the depths of buyout hell? That’s the question. Please read on to page 2.
