Social Bookmarking is for techies. Unfortunately it never went into the heads of normal people, so the end results is bunch of techies discussing links to poular sites + newbie webmasters spamming for backlinks. I see Digg.com value at less than $100 million. It really has no value considering poor converting traffic unless you want to sell affiliate products especially some techie stuff might do well. Secondly don't forget that Digg already kicked off google ads for MSN Adcenter. I dont think this deal is going anywhere. IMO, kevin missed the right time sell DIGG. He could have got $500+ million if he sold it about a year back. Now, The market is well aware after yahoo-delcious deal that social bookmarking is trash.
IMO, you should think the other way. Why would Google want to buy Digg? I can't find the real reason. Buying something that is popular and gives almost nothing to your business has no sense.
How much a website makes i snot important for google, But they want to buy all huge traffic website, to make themself a need for almost every internet user.
I find it strange too, there isn't much things about Digg that Google cant duplicate and duplicate better. With the current Google popularity, if they are to launch a service similar to Digg, I am sure it will be more popular and surpass Digg very soon, without the hefty price tag.
Check http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/2...tions-to-acquire-digg-for-around-200-million/ to see what is going on between Google and Digg
200M is too much even though Google has the capability to buy Digg! and I think that google will not risk a lot of money for nothing or not to worthy for them!
From how I see it, the reason isnt so black and white. they're not thinking of buying it for 200 mil to make that amount back and more. its much more long term than that. google have been interested in using digg to help its search engine algorithm for quite a while now. it already uses it as a variable in how well pages should rank in google. lifesearch.co.uk created an article about life and death and submitted it to digg, it got to the digg front page and all of a sudden it ranks on the first page for the term "life insurance" in google.
Found this interesting article, posted 16 hours ago: http://www.profy.com/2008/07/23/digg-acquisition-google-money-microsoft/
The real question here is, will Google still consider Digg traffic as crap for AdSense? That is will it still pay low to advertisers on traffic coming from Digg?
I won't feel strange if google buy the digg. Google , Microsoft and other internet giant enterprises always buy.
You guys are hilarious. Do you think Google is buying Digg for the ads potential of it or something like that? 200 mil is LOW for Digg. It's a bargain if they let it go for 200 mil.
That's what I thought, even the comments about it on Techcrunch are in the same vain. Google buy things to enhance the bigger picture of their role to monetize information on the net. Not as obvious as something like a breeding ground for adverts, Google are interested in its inherit benefits that come from such a website.