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January 23, 2007

Europe’s Digg Killer Raises €4 million

Michael Arrington

53 comments »

Luxembourg-based Wikio, Europe’s best hope against Digg, Google News and Technorati (it is sort of a mashup of all three), has closed a €4 million ($5.3 million) Series A round of financing. This follows a previous angel round of financing of an undisclosed size (investors in that round included as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Freddy Mini, Ouriel Ohayon, and Jeff Clavier). The financing round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.

The company recently launched English, German and Spanish versions of the site.

TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon is an investor and board member at Wikio, although we have no other conflicts with the company. Personally, I think Wikio has a lot of work to do before it can effectively compare itself to Digg, Technorati and others. This thing is no Skype.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 7:00 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Andrea Vascellari’s Blog » 2.0 Made in Europe

    May 14th, 2007 at 9:54 am

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  1. pierre chappaz

    January 23rd, 2007 at 7:16 am

    Mike what is the point is showing an alexa graphic comparing 2 well established sites with Wikio.com, which only one month old? We have one url per country not only the .com, and in addition if you were to look at Wikio.fr on Alexa please keep in mind that Alexa bar is not used widely in France. Same in several other european countries.

    I invite european users to do a quick benchmark between Google news, technorati and Wikio for their own country and make their mind. We are aware that we have a lot of work in front of us, but I’d appreciate an honest feed back as we are here to listen to users and offer them the best information service.

    Pierre Chappaz
    Chairman Wikio

  2. Leo Casey

    January 23rd, 2007 at 7:47 am

    wow! 4 M. Not bad!

  3. Yohay Elam

    January 23rd, 2007 at 7:58 am

    Well, I think that Daily Motion is the leading video site in Europe, not Youtube. So maybe one day Wikio will pass Digg in Europe as well.

  4. Sylvain

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:18 am

    I personally use Wikio, but I have to say that I still find more informations on Google News (for example, I ran many queries about MIDEM this Sunday and didn’t find a lot of things in Wikio)

  5. techdandy

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:27 am

    Mike, is TC on the board of almost all the sites that you review here with added hype? Wikio has close to 9000 users of which almost 8800 of those have no posting, no comments or any sort of contribution to the site. That means there are only few players that are pushing the stories forward. Really what different does it make from digg? Why does Europe need another digg if it is just a clone of it? Makes me wonder how they pulled the $4M off from those investors in the hope to beat digg.

  6. sceptic

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:32 am

    “Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe” - what absolute BS

    “This thing is no Skype”, it’s certainly no digg either

  7. RBA

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:43 am

    IMHO, the real killers usualy don’t put themselves in the “killer” category ahead of time. They do it silently and before you know it, it’s done.

  8. techdandy

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:46 am

    RBA - Is coRank.com going to be one of them?

  9. Peter

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:46 am

    Why does everyone get so antsy when a new social news site comes up and you all just bash it…I don’t understand why a few of you are so tight with Digg, get your head out of your asses…and for the record, I don’t think Wikio is near Digg, and it’s obvious there is not many contributors, and rightfully, why should there be, with Digg as well. And Alexa is missleading! :)

  10. Fred

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:51 am

    popurls.com has raised 50$ and has approx. five times the traffic of wikio. And it’s european, too.

  11. pierre chappaz

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:58 am

    >techdandy: Wikio is not another Digg as we index automatically thousands of blogs and media. Not just user generated content. That being said, you should remember that in Europe not all people speak english and Digg is only in english.

    >RBA: you are right: the real killers usualy don’t put themselves in the “killer” category ahead of time. And we don’t. We should let to Mike the responsibility of his title, that’s certainly not our claim as we don’t define ourselves as a Digg-like but a personalized news search engine.

    >Peter: thank you :-)

  12. Choco

    January 23rd, 2007 at 9:08 am

    @Yohay Elam (#3)

    Could you provide some proof of that? My first google search doesn’t support that:
    http://www.businessweek.com/gl.....086712.htm

    Across Europe, YouTube has around 10% to 12% reach, vs. 2% for Daily Motion. About half the video clips on Daily Motion are in French, with many of the rest in English.

  13. Janko Roettgers

    January 23rd, 2007 at 9:30 am

    I honestly don’t understand why anyone would invest four million Euros in a company that doesn’t even get the grammar on their localized sites right. Some stuff on the German site sounds like cheap Google language tools translation …

  14. Guk

    January 23rd, 2007 at 9:44 am

    Why the hell do you need 4 Million to run a website!??!?!

  15. Cesare

    January 23rd, 2007 at 10:17 am

    The company recently launched italian version: http://www.wikio.it, i was on google news also but, wikio in italian offer better results, because they have real people adding blogs,
    human are still better than PC!
    ciao belli

  16. RBA

    January 23rd, 2007 at 10:55 am

    #8 (techdandy) Nope, not at all.

    Digg is here to stay, just like some people claimed that Digg was the Slashdot killer, yet Slashdot is still live and well. Those who copy functionality won’t take over, and those who offer a different functionality will be addressing a different “problem” - that leaves Digg happy and dandy doing what it does best.

    The only area where Digg is failing is for news not in English, and people is going other places to get that kind of stuff already, and since they target a different audience, they can hardly “kill” Digg.

  17. Alexandre

    January 23rd, 2007 at 11:26 am

    Response to pierre chappaz in comment #1 where he says
    “We have one url per country not only the .com(…)”

    I’m sorry but your wikio.pt url doesn’t seem to be working. Portugal is not only an European country but it’s also a member of the European Union.

    Regards

  18. Drama 2.0

    January 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 am

    If Digg with its 20 million visitor (ha) monthly audience can’t break even, why would you put money into something doing substantially the same thing? This looks like all the other news and blog sites. Nothing compelling.

    And these startups really need to start coming up with better names. Wikio? Wikia?

  19. Adam benayoun

    January 23rd, 2007 at 12:06 pm

    Knowing the french, they will be more opened to adopt a french version of digg than digg itself. Take in mind that Europe is very strong and if wikio will launch in every language in Europe they might have more visitors than digg in the next 18 months.
    Im sure that wikio will use its money wisely, whats im really concerned about is the cost of running several sites vs running one site such as digg.

  20. christian

    January 23rd, 2007 at 12:14 pm

    it’s so funny how these people come out with these sites..

    the UI of this site is terrible..the design, disgusting

    what makes them think they can compete with digg?!

  21. djoules

    January 23rd, 2007 at 12:24 pm

    Looks like many people are skeptic about Wikio here. I like Pierre Chappaz through his blog where he seems to be a nice guy.
    Some of the investors lead projects in which Chappaz is himself an investor if my memory is good.
    Wikio is a digg-like with two main differences :
    - feeded by people (costly ?)
    - with countryandlanguage-related links
    Will those difference justify its place in the market? i’d say yes if i believed in Digg, which i don’t (sorry Pierre).

    Maybe some new new features might make Wikio more interesting. Pierre mentions Wikio Shopping, let’s see what it’s like.

    Anyway, even so i hope i’m wrong and wish Wikio good luck for the next step: making money!

    (but it’s true the name is… well…)

  22. Dennis

    January 23rd, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    I’ve used wikio and I have to say it is much, much better then digg when it comes to getting to relevant tech news without all the drama. No stories about what Steve Jobs ate for lunch or flame wars over Win vs Mac vs Linux. Interestingly enough, I submitted the story to digg and got my account banned…..I blogged about it here http://bluephoenixmedia.blogspot.com/ in case anyone’s interested…..is digg afraid of wikio that much that they’d ban me for talking about it?

  23. William

    January 23rd, 2007 at 2:20 pm

    wow, I’m impressed.
    First, that Wikio got 4€ million, -which I’m really happy for them, as I very much like the site-; second, that they’re from Luxembourg!

    I never knew this, it’s incredible. I live in Luxembourg =)

    Well, Cheers and good luck!

    Will.

  24. Webananalyctisbook.com

    January 23rd, 2007 at 2:21 pm

    Europe has about 560 million citizens and adding a few million each year. :-)The US is currently at about 300 million.
    The potential for a digg like site is immense (if done right!) . Recent “clones” have been sold for decent money e.g. Facebook clone StudiVZ (8 months old!) sold for 85 million Euro. Just the coverage by US tech blogs was a little bit weak :-) So let’s sit back and relax. Nobody is out there to kill digg.com. It is just a new service for the European crowd.

  25. more Swedish insider IT news.

    January 23rd, 2007 at 2:29 pm

    I like it. It has potential.

  26. Josh

    January 23rd, 2007 at 2:55 pm

    Personally, I am not a fan of mashups only because there is zero innovation.

    However, I congratulate you on doing something digg should have done a while ago.

  27. Amy Wilsch

    January 23rd, 2007 at 3:13 pm

    @Webananalyctisbook.com - yeah but at least 20+ languages. Makes it kind of hard to create one interface all these millions of people/countries being added can all use…

  28. Thomas Marban

    January 23rd, 2007 at 3:40 pm

    Ok, I’m not really Thomas Marban of Popurls. But I bet commenter “Fred” isn’t really isn’t “Fred” either!

  29. php lemon

    January 23rd, 2007 at 3:55 pm

    i’ve used wikio for quite a while now. i really like the site and i am glad they have got the extra finance.

    - Phil

  30. Webmonkian

    January 23rd, 2007 at 4:12 pm

    As of now there are 66 users who have made one comment or more and only a few hundered with any contributions (from ~9000 total users)
    http://www.wikio.com/users?sort=5

    There is no obvious business model. Assume they will add advertising or something like this.

    The site itself is okay but fairly simple (and sloooooooooowwwwww) - it seems like a fairly basic version of digg or Reddit with a bit of news.google thrown in for good measure. Am I missing something? I can’t see how this could take more than a couple of months to develop…

    $5.3m series A funding probably means between 20-40% share - this values the company somewhere between $13-25m post funding - note the ‘about us’ section says they previously started with €1.66m (~$2.15m).

    I can’t see any reason for such a high valuation. This is complete B.S. !!! Either there is something really, really big behind the scenes which hasn’t been released yet which is absolutely amazing and is gonna completely blow our minds or we’re in one hell of a bubble.

    If someone can put me right on this and explain why $5.3m series A funding for such a project makes sense, then please do… please, really!

  31. Jordan

    January 23rd, 2007 at 4:21 pm

    What is the point of making a “Europeon Digg” if the stories on the front page are:

    The Supreme Court’s war on sentencing guidelines. (US Supreme Court?)
    How the FBI dropped the ball on Foley. (US FBI?)
    Apple still not off the hook for $1.99 fee (American Dollars?)
    Carter: Book Has Prompted Discussion (A Former US President?)
    Judge allows Bears’ Johnson to play in Super Bowl (The Super Bowl? Do most Europeons even know what the Super Bowl is?)
    Brad Pitt Owes His Career Success to Strippers (An American Actor?)

    Evidentally the people at Wikio didn’t get the memo: the internet does not conform to geographic demographs. Your site will be populated by the general population of the internet, just like Digg is, just like Google is.

  32. mattmollysdad

    January 23rd, 2007 at 4:38 pm

    Europe? who cares

  33. Leon

    January 23rd, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    This site looks like it will be a Jack of all trades and Master of none.

  34. Choco

    January 23rd, 2007 at 5:49 pm

    @#32 and others who like to divide EU and US sites based on their grounding.. that’s none-sense. Sites beat eachother on performance, nothing more nothing less.

  35. ryan

    January 23rd, 2007 at 5:50 pm

    Until they release the site in Luxembourgish…I will refuse to use it. Gudde moien. But seriously…seems to be a good site.

  36. Dave

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:23 pm

    The dog feces stuck to the bottom of my left boot has more meaning to me than wikeo or whatever the hell it is called. Who cares, no one will every use it when reddit is already here.

  37. SearcH EngineS WeB

    January 23rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm

    ___________________________________

    It is in essence a combination of: NOWPUBLIC - and Shoutwire

  38. LucSen

    January 23rd, 2007 at 10:59 pm

    I’m using Wikio.fr and, if there’s still room for improvement, I have to admit that this is actually the best information service available in French… I’m not sure it has to be compared to Digg as it is more Google News oriented with collaborative features.

  39. Drama 2.0

    January 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm

    Webmonkian: interesting. You’d think investors would look at this type of data before investing in another round. If they started with $2+ million, this type of usage is not incredibly encouraging. As an investor I personally would have hoped that a lot more could have been achieved in terms of usage given the amount of money provided in the first round.

  40. Nina

    January 24th, 2007 at 12:21 am

    this makes me sick to my stomach, the fine europeans know only one trade these days is to copy everything Americans do and complain about their stupidity!
    I am german, that is why I can tell.

    Nina

  41. Ouriel Ohayon

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:06 am

    it would be fair to remind that alexa, that is only in english, is hardly used i europe. Therefore the comparison is not relevant (specially when you know that wikio has several urls and not only a .com that was released a few weeks ago only)

  42. Michael Arrington

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:06 am

    Nina - Skype was pretty cool though. There’s lots of innovation going on in Europe.

  43. kryss

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:06 am

    http://www.scoopeo.com is actually the first digg-like in french.
    they have more clics and more comments than wikio.fr (and probably more traffic)
    they are only 2 guys working on it and they have some very original options and tools on their site

  44. Rob

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:18 am

    4€ million is huge amount. I think this is a unique kind of service in Europe. Really impressive.

  45. flyintiger

    January 24th, 2007 at 2:24 am

    So I guess the next business model is to launch a European Alexa !

  46. manfrys

    January 24th, 2007 at 3:08 am

    … so in italian too! I love digg/reddit and hope wikio deserve the same!

  47. Joeri Van Holder

    January 24th, 2007 at 3:18 am

    No wikio.be or wikio.nl, pitty for a Luxembourg-based company just next to us…

  48. Dario Salvelli

    January 24th, 2007 at 5:47 am

    I want to remember also the Italian Version of Wikio: http://www.wikio.it (with also a blog http://blog.wikio.com/it/).

  49. techdandy

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:21 am

    Webmonkian:

    Right. As per my comment above, even the site http://www.techtagg.com has more users using it and alexa is good for them as well. They were one of the originals to revenue share through Google Adsense with people.

  50. Nina

    January 24th, 2007 at 6:38 am

    Michael Arrington
    you are right, but it’s only a fraction and it ok to live with. it’s the european aptitude towards American !

  51. Nitr021

    January 24th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    Right…. i don’t think it is not even a killer, have you seen the amount of “diggs” oh.. i meant “votes” on each article? Not really active as digg is.

    But kudos on the design I quite like the interface, its quite colourful and i like the related stories idea but then again a digger always a digger.

  52. Ryan Mickle

    January 25th, 2007 at 8:09 pm

    What on earth will they do with all that money? I don’t think I could even spend $1MM a year.

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