Report: Al Gore’s CurrentTV Offered $100 Million For Digg In 2006
Michael Arrington
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Note: trust me, the picture makes sense once you read the quotes below.
Sarah Lacy’s new book, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 (goes on sale on Thursday, pre-order here, get free autographed copy here) does a deep dive into the histories of a number of high profile web startups.
But Lacy was also able to uncover a few stories that were never covered in the day-to-day press. One of my favorites: the story of a failed 2006 attempt by Al Gore’s CurrentTV to buy Digg:
At the meeting Gore ran the room. He charmed everyone on the Digg team. He remembered everyone’s name, and if someone got cut off, he was careful to come back to him and ask him to finish what he was saying. It was quite a contrast to the meeting with Murdoch. “It made me feel so good to know this guy is legit,” Kevin says, remembering and still glowing. “You could just tell.”
…
They came back a few weeks later. Gore was there again, with a glossy PowerPoint presentation that showed the CurrentTV and Digg logos coming together. Gore was standing in front of the screen, eyes on Kevin, with the Digg logo projected across his forehead. Kevin was trying his hardest to pay attention to what Gore was saying, but he was focusing at this large Digg logo on Al Gore’s forehead, thinking, “Oh. My. God.” That night twenty-nine-year-old Kevin called his parents. “You’re never going to believe what I saw on Al Gore’s forehead today,” he said.
CurrentTV ultimately made an offfer “at least in the range of $100 million,” but Rose and Digg CEO Jay Adelson walked away due to issues of control going forward.
Digg has been the subject of nearly constant buyout speculation, starting with a $4 million offer from Jason Calcanis in 2005 and a rumored $30 million deal with Yahoo in January 2006. More recently we reported their recent efforts to sell through investment bank Allen & Co. The complete history is here.
At the time of the offer, Digg had just 1.3 million or so monthly unique visitors according to Comscore. Today, Comscore says they have 13.3 million worldwide monthly uniques (this is almost certainly lower than actual). But sources have been telling us that they’ve been unable to get to their desired $200 million offer and may be raising money instead.
Issues of control? For $100M, fill your boots with all the control you want!
That’s an awesome story and one more reason to buy Lacy’s book. Ha ha, sweet!
Hahaha, great story and nice job with the picture!
I recently attended the launch of Current in Italy, which is their first non-English speaking venture. Al Gore was there, and I had the chance to spend a few minutes talking to him. Yes, it is great to see a professional politician who is indeed legit. He does walk the walk.
There is also a video that I posted about our meeting on the OpenSpime website.
- Was the offer stock or cash? That certainly is the difference between $100MM and the “potential” of $100MM.
- Unlikely Rose and Adelson unilaterally decided based purely on control concerns. It was the price (or currency) and the the opinion of their investors that would drive the decision.
Great story.
I’m still betting they don’t sell any time soon. They are still seeing huge growth and are successfully making it more mainstream, much to their core user’s annoyance
http://www.hubdub.com/m7340/Wh.....March_2009
They should make Al Gore a regular on Diggnation (with or without the Digg logo slapped on his head!)
Screwed up that link. How about: Is there a future for tech on Digg?
Great story. But I don’t think that Kevin might get $200 million offer.
If the Digg deal did not go through and Gore recognized the potential of this type of social news outlet- it is possible that he could have approached other similar sites for example: Reddit or Netscape.
It would be odd if after that defeat - he would just have given up on the idea
Watch out for my book The Fall of Web 2.0 and back to the dark ages : I will be documenting the tremendous f ups by Digg, Facebook, and Twitter, and how there will be no web 3.0 and companies need to fall back to actual business models. Amazon, and ebay as case studies of how after the bubble business’s that survived were those that actually had a business model.
I like Digg - it’s perfect one!
Interesting piece…
at the time, Calcanis’ offer was definitley too low…but Yahoo’s looked like a deal - kind of surprised they passed up 10X money
They saw the potential of Digg…that’s why they passed the money..if they want or have to sell now it wouldn’t in the $30 mil range for sure…only if, like somebody said, the Web 2.0 will fall and we return in the dark ages :)…
yeah, whatever. that was 2 years ago. And why do you write about it now? To remind everyone Digg is still shopping itself around?
They should have sold, since then IRR of this venture only went down! I didn’t visit the site for months
anyone notice the big AFFILIATE CODE on the links to sarah’s book? isn’t that the exact thing Michael has just posted about with Wired? that he discloses? i am sure we will see 10 more book posts this week.
Digg & Gore
Perfect match. Digg, filled with Che Guevara leftists and Gore, filled with a steaming pile of convenient “truth”.
Yeah, that would have been a good match. All the Dig wack-job leftists and Gore could have circle jerked each other. It would indeed have been a love fest.
Yawn.
Lacy has a book coming out?
Amazon affiliate link … classy
Where’s Ted Murphy when you need him?
Um- does anyone remember her SXSW Zuckerberg fiasco? I hope she is a better writer than she is as moderator.
http://blog.wired.com/underwir.....zucke.html
Digg over the years.
2006, with 1.3M users, they got a $100M offer.
Competitors: barely none.
2008, with 13.3M users, they can’t get $200M.
Competitors: Yahoo Buzz. MSN reporter. Propeller.
2010, with XX.XM users, they are expecting to get what?
Competitors: Yahoo Buzz. MSN reporter. Propeller. Google? Others…
See the trend…
(I voluntarily omitted Reddit)
I love current.tv
Back when I had satellite it was a station I could always turn to if I wanted something good to watch at all times.
I like it a bit more now that I know Al Gore owns it.
those guys are idiots to turn down 100 million
digg is a fad site and can easyily be replace either by another site or tech bubble
$200 MILLION DOLLARS!!! ?
OMG, that’s a million dollars for each of the 200 left-wing, BUSH-bashing, OBAMA-crazy wacko trolls who actually succeed in getting their stories homepaged these days!
GIVE me a
break!
So why didn’t DIGG take the cash? Here’s the truth:
AL GORE’s plan for digg.com is to just dump the voting and redirect the domain to “dailykos,com”. 70% of the stories on Digg already link there and “huffingtonpost,com” anyway.
Interesting comment on the book on amazon, http://www.amazon.com/DRECK-AL.....tore=books
If any of you looked at Current’s IPO filing, you would understand that there is no way much of the offer was in cash. they have tens of Millions in debt.
So the question is - how much at that time was 100M out of Current, and what is the future of Current?
$100 million for digg in 2006… It would definitely be a tough decision to say no to that kind of money!
They may or may not be able to get $200 million today, I guess only time will tell.
And instead of digg.com, Current went and build their own version. Check out current.com now. It has arguably better User Interface, allowing their users to submit stories, comment on them with text, links, or video.
The stories that gets voted up, appears on their hourly CurrentNews on the TV network.
All pretty sweet, with the problem of not having enough liquidity yet to make system work as intended, which is why, of course, they would be willing to drop $100mm large on digg to begin with.
Awesome story! Too funny…
great story. i already ordered the book and really looking forward to reading it. i actually think digg is worth way more than 200m.
I’m glad Kevin didn’t sell out to a left leaning commie.
Gore could have just said he invented it and then accused Digg of not giving him his rightful ownership…. must be because of global warming.
Didn’t Gore invent Digg, the Internet and modern day photography?
now this is interesting
This is nuts. There is nothing of value at Digg except the names of a few million people. They shun original content and blacklist you if you post links to your own ideas or blogs. It is simply a convenience tool for accmlumating news stories and stealing comment traffic, which should go to the original publisher!