The Next Web

Digg: Not for Sale & Adding 15 to 20 new features

Written on December 3, 2008 – 11:39 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Everything is for sale if you pay the right price, right? Well, not Digg according to Jay Adelson who spoke with BusinessWeek recently. Digg’s new focus lies on becoming profitable as soon as possible. That of course is the right thing to say if you want to be bought.

On the other hand; Digg has reportedly been shopping itself around for years and rumors regularly surfaced about an impending sale. That sale never materialized and it could just be that Digg is running out of potential buyers. With the current state of the economy it makes a lot of sense to focus on revenues instead of an exit. Because it is common sense AND makes you more interesting for potential buyers.

Here are some of the new features Digg wants to add to increase traffic and revenue:

• sell ads on its RSS feeds
• keep costs reasonable
• focus more on the top-line revenue
• increase engagement on the site (by introducing new features)
• make Digg more social
• a revamped version of its search engine to offer more relevant search advertisements.
• International expansion by acquiring local Digg clones

Jay mentions there is ”probably a list of 15 to 20 things we want to do” in the following year. All to increase user interaction and thereby pageviews and revenue.

I hope you like that post!

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

acquisition, acquisitions, digg, exit, Jay Adelson, kevin rose

No Comments »

Forget Google & Microsoft! Aim for Apple!

Written on December 8, 2007 – 10:49 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

My guess is that 95% of all current businessplan mention Google at the first logical exit partner. It used to be Yahoo and Microsoft before that. But it seems that there is another company that is swimming in cash and looking for innovative companies to aqcuire: Apple.

With a cash reserve of up to $15 billion (Source: Fortune) they sure can afford to spend a couple of billion on your business. And you might say that they are a hardware company and are probably not interested in your little Web2.0 scheme. But Apple is so much bigger than just hardware these days. They are a hardware, software, telephony, music, ecommerce and multimedia company. One thing they aren’t yet is a search or social network company. But why not change that? iTunes was a Mac only product at first but then turned ‘PC’ after a year or so and is THE music player on Windows now.

What if Apple would acquire Facebook? They can afford it, in cash, and would suddenly become THE online social network player with the hippest offline social meeting places in the world: The Apple store.

Yep, it is time for Apple to start making some acquisitions in the Internet world. What will YOU sell to Apple in 2008?

acquire, acquisitions, Apple, billions, business, money

3 Comments »