Did you guys knew that Digg is in talks with News Corp. to be bought with a minimum of $150 million ?
Yeah, but if they are floating out $150 million, I don't think they expect it to be a ton higher. Youtube was floated out at a billion dollars or so. Mark Cuban, I think, said someone would be stupid to buy it at that price.
Well, that remains to be seen, I think. I can't picture spending 1.5 billion for a company with no profits, ever, but that's me. and I don't have 10 billion in the bank
They spent stock. Not cash. Google doesn't have 1.5 billion in cash. They released stock, and practically, the corporations/individuals that bought that stock, paid for YouTube.
Yeah I know they used stock. I thought I read somewhere that google has $10 billion in the bank right now? I could be wrong, maybe they meant stock too. I just think time will tell with Youtube, and same with Digg (if its not profitable, which I assume it isn't), given its lower mass appeal, its price tag would be a lot lower.
Google has a ton of cash. They had to get rid of some of it because they were flirting with being regulated as a fund. I don't think the YouTube purchase made a lot of sense. As for Digg, I am not sure Digg has a real value of $150 million, but Rubert Murdoch has been very good at picking up web properties the last few years. MySpace of course, and then IGN.
News Corp, has like 6 TV stations, 40 worldwide newspapers, 5 cable companies, 20 century fox, etc. What the heck do they want from Digg ? It's like a toothpick compared to what they have.
When I sell my site for $150 mil. I will post in this thread Back on topic, though... I do see YouTube as something with atleast 10x the potential of Digg so the price is consistent w/that. Just curious, why don't you think it was good idea (the YouTube acquisition)? I thought Shoemoney posted a pretty convincing list of potential synergies / benefits over at http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/10/09/10-reasons-why-the-google-youtube-deal-make-sense/ I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this
Purely because of the content problems, and the future copyleft issues. It's much easier to sue Google a multi billion dollar coporation, than YouTube.
That, or it's much more difficult, because they have (as has been pointed out above) a HUGE amount of cash they can spend on legal resources.
You'll find a lot of the bigger traditional media providors are going to be moving into the internet over the next few months and buying up big ticket sites. With the relative decrease in budget spend on TV and radio advertising and massive increase in internet spend over the last couple of years, companies like Newscorp will want to stay ahead of the game.
Internet advertising has already taken over radio advertising so a lot of these conventional media companies will be snapping up web based ad space. I just hope Rose et al won't sell out to the evil Murdoch empire.
Sadly I think that's what we're going to be seeing. It'll be interesting if there's a backlash from users of sites that sell out and they might well move on elsewhere if the legitimacy of the site is lost.
I'd love to see a mass exodus. I might consider it myself, I don't want these people to know what I'm interested in and who's in my social network.