Four companies (including Google and Microsoft) to bid for DIGG

Published by Charl Norman on Mar 7th, 2008, 3 Comments

Digg A lot of people speculated some time ago that the user-driven social content website, Digg, is going to sell but they were wrong. It’s been a few months since the last rumor, but here we go again. TechCrunch has inside tips that Kevin Rose may actually sell this time having two media companies and two Internet giants, Microsoft and Google, to make their bids.

The investment bank Allen & Co. was saying last year that Digg would probably accept offers below the $300 million mark and they were probably right because Google is prepared to bid in the $200-$225M range.

Who’s buying is very important, especially to Microsoft who’s the only company to serve advertising on Digg for a three years contract. If Google buys it then the contract will probably be terminated and Google wins, this is why Microsoft will probably go higher.

I wasn’t expecting it so soon, and to be honest I think they will lose a big portion of their users when the sale gets a green light. What do you think?

http://www.southafrica.to South African

All these platforms are popular until the next best thing comes along. I see locally focussed ranking sites like bestofindya.com and our own muti.co.za becoming increasingly popular.

I’d be surprised if a Microsoft purchase makes more than a small impact on the userbase, with the diehard Microsoft haters moving on.
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http://www.techmongrel.com Matthew

I’m not sure if this deal will have a huge impact on the industry really. I wouldn’t say that Digg is the type of concept or mechanism to drive extensive growth of a company’s web initiative. I’d have to agree that Microsoft will not really gain much of an advantage over Google if they make this deal, because if I was faced with a better version of Digg (which I wouldnt imagine being that difficult to achieve as a developer – goguide.co.za is a good example), marketed by Google for example, I don’t believe I’d have any loyalty towards Digg.

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