Google’s negotiations with Digg have become serious, and Techcrunch heard whispers at Google that the companies have signed a letter of intent and are expected to close the deal within a couple of weeks. With the acquirement, Digg will be brought under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range.
Democratic news website
Digg started as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson in the last quarter of 2004, and raised it’s initial funding of 2.8 million in the second quarter of 2005. When Yahoo bought Del.icio.us in 2005, many people expected Google to buy Digg. In contrary, it was Yahoo that was rumored to buy Digg in 2006. In 2008, Yahoo releases a Digg clone (one of many, including Netscape), while Jay Edelson denied talking to them in March, it seems that Google is seriously interested in the democratic news site. Currently, the domain digg is estimated to attract at least 239 million visitors per year.
4 reasons why the acquirement is good news
- 1. Google didn’t kill Youtube or Feedburner etc. Some say that Feedburner development has stalled, think again. With the acquirement by Google, Feedburner introduced advertisements and many other new features in the last year. Would you like to see Digg get bought by FOX or AOL?
- 2. New features that would be impossible before Why? Digg has expanded their categories, and included video and pictures over the years, but face it; Digg is a place for tech geeks. Also, the fact that Digg will fall under the Google News property is good news, since they might be able to bring Digg to the next level.
- 3. Keeping Google freshThe guys at Digg can bring some fresh wind into corporate Google, keeping the company close to the ground.
- 4. Search engine will work better The digg search engine has been getting better over the last year, (read more)
Digg may be dead for many of us but what acquisition will definitely mean is more mainstream popularity for Digg itself – Google will not only use Digg as an additional advertising property, it will also send extra traffic to Digg and this will be mainstream traffic.
I tend to be more skeptical – Google has armies of engineers working to develop Digg-like features, and there is nothing much, other than a bit of buzz, that Digg per se brings to Google. See similar perspective here:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/07/23/digg-offers-little-to-rumored-buyer-google
Paola, absolutely correct – Google could launch a similar service in a matter of days if wanted. But I still have a feeling that Google may pursue this deal if only to annoy Microsoft where it can (which I mentioned as one of the reasons in my own post on the subject linked to under my name).