Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 14:33
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Well, as you’d imagine, there are all kinds of hypotheses online already over the beneficial or detrimental effect any Google buyout of Digg.
Flickr is still an enormously popular destination for photos after its buyout by Yahoo. MySpace is suffering on a worldwide basis compared with Facebook since the News Corp buyout, but in the US is still has stellar traffic. YouTube struggles to make money and has attracted billion dollar lawsuits but is still the web’s top video sharing destination.
But there are examples of failures where the Google effect hasn’t taken a site or service its bought out and sent it into the stratosphere.
An article at
The Inquisitr on the "Four Ways Google could destroy Digg" notes that Feedburner has stagnated since Google purchased it, Jaiku has done a lot worse, Blogger is a “spam trap” and Google Analytics ignored the Urchin user base until growing dissatisfaction forced Google to release an update to existing software that had been ready two years prior to Google releasing the update.
The article goes into a lot more detail on each topic, explaining exactly where Google tripped up and stopped playing with its shiny and newly acquired toys, but the theme is clear – just because Google (or some other big company like Yahoo, Microsoft and others) throw money at you, there’s absolutely no guarantee the move will truly be successful.
We can also make the easy observation that Google could just create its own Digg-like site. It has the resources, programming talent, brand name and user base.
But the Google brand name has done little for Orkut against MySpace and Facebook, and for all the popularity of Gmail it still has hundreds of millions of fewer users than Yahoo Mail.
So, why not buy up Digg?
Continued...
