After being passed up by Google for an acquisition in the $200-million range, social news site Digg is going it alone with a fresh $28.7 million infusion of capital. The C round was led by new investor Highland Capital Partners, which as joined by existing investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network, SVB Capital. That brings the total amount the company has raised to $40 million since it was founded four years ago. Founder Kevin Rose may have taken some cash off the table, Om is reporting.
The company has big plans for the new cash. It will double its current staff to 150 over the next year or so, move to a new corporate headquarters, localize Digg sites for international markets, give publishers better analytics, and spend more on marketing. Digg will also no doubt try to improve its service by making its recommendations even better and more targeted to each individual member. (A partnership with Facebook that is about to launch should prove interesting in this regard).
Digg claims 30 million monthly unique users. ComScore, however, counts 15.8 million uniques worldwide as of August, and 6 million in the U.S., both of which were down from July. (Quantcast shows 21.4 million global uniques, and 11.4 million U.S.). At least in the U.S., Digg’s traffic seems to be flattening. So you can see why the company wants to emphasize global expansion. Here is a chart of its U.S. traffic:
And here is a chart of global traffic:
Highland must have too much money. They should invest in WAMU.
Why the hell does digg need 150 employees for? Hell, its not like they innovate all new features or anything. anyone can install pligg and have a clone in a few minutes that runs itself.
andrew and olivia weigh in {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/VjuEUNBQTU_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”andrew and olivia weigh in ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/XqldFbSBbw”}}}
what a douche.
The main reason that digg is so popular and is able to crash servers is that Kevin Rose used TechTV’s screen time to advertise his site whenever he had camera time. Its surprising he hasn’t been sued for that…yet.
Plus, lets not pretend he dreamed up this magical idea. He took slashdot, and made it to where you dont have to wait for approval for a story. Thats all.
Someone asked me what I thought of Digg. The problem with Digg is the rabid views of it’s Gen Y audience.
I think they should change the name to Dikk.com
Hahaha, I think there are some people on Digg with rabid views. But that probably goes with any of these kinds of sites… Gen Y is taking over !!!
Right. They are taking over control of their dorm room.
Gen Y is changing.
They are starting to ask mom and dad for money _before_ the next video game comes out.
They also are promising to shower at least once a week.
Bad Web karma, dude. You made me click through to a second page, but didn’t give me anything else besides a Crunchbase? I want my pvs back.
You caught me writing in mid-post :) There’s more flava for you now.
Phew! Didn’t want to have to settle things Brooklyn-style.
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“Fail”
Where the hell is my funding. I have a stripped down digg (social media in general). Make friends, and that’s it. Because that’s what its all about.
Anyone wanna give me 100K so I can add my support staff for http://www.friendmenow.com . After funding we’ll add groups.
spam
Either that, or a joke as evident by this page http://www.frie...ow.com/home/why
Some people leave their sense of humor at home when they show up for work.
friendmenow.com I LOVE IT!!!
lol @ http://www.friendmenow.com …. nice work !!
This spoof site is pure genius!
To hell with Twitter, FriendFeed, and the rest of the over rated 2.0 services currently clogging the market.
we should start by getting rid off these fag*ots that keep spamming that webmod shit. stop advertising you bunch of assholes
friendmenow.com can spam this! i needed a laugh. Check out the profiles…
Seriously, its about time somebody reduced our bogus social networking BS to friendmenow. Love it.
DIGG deleted my account and accused me of spamming, when it wasn’t true.
Is your official birth name “www.ShawnDrewry.com”?
ROFL !!! Hahahahaha
wow 40 million total for a company not even worth 200 million priceless. the value of digg drops each year . when it was a novelty site 40 million total investment wasnt a bad idea but now you have sites like reddit and likes doing the same thing i dont get what vc can get out of it jmho.
The Google acquisition of Digg was a Rumor. – Why is it still being reported as fact?
so does this mean that your BS story a while back about how google’s gonna but digg is kaput? LOL. jeez, you guys suck at reporting accurate news. but hey, your great at pulling rumors out of your ass.
Wow, I don’t know, 200M is a lot of money for Digg. It seem like they should have taken it.
Really I think Google offer could be better for Digg, to maintain an standalone politic is not a good option.
My Guess is that this C round means they are in for the long haul and have to make revenue. Because the acquisition climate is said to be cooling according to the TC50 VC panel.
Any thoughts?
If they can keep getting people to give them money, why not? No one has made them an offer they like, and they aren’t profitable (yet). They may never be profitable. What else are they really supposed to do?
You know, if you are small and looking to keep a large equity stake then taking on huge money can be problematic. But once you get to the size of Digg, your equity share just isn’t terribly important anymore if there is no buyer.
gigaom.com has some good coverage of this as well including a frightening stat: 1 percent of digg users represent over 30 percent of monthly views…
the guys shouldn’t be given any more money.. after so many companies have passed on them or they turned down , there has to be something seriously wrong over there. They need to throw in the towel.. get whatever they can get and bail.
props to Digg honestly, I feel as Digg came out the deal with Google bitter, now with some kind of vengeance of proving Google wrong and showing them that they are worth what the asking price was.
Digg is history, unless they come up with something really cool to make money
Why so many companies are handling so much money without beeing profitable for so much time? Are all of them just bubbles?
On the other side of the medail, companies like this offers (sometimes) great services for free.
What is wrong?
Based on the Digg financing, it makes sense for us to fund FriendMeNow.com.
SIG agrees to provide $100k in bridge financing to FriendMeNow.com structured as a social default swap.
http://siginc.wordpress.com/
Nice goof – Sign me up for the PPLS program on SIG Inc.
no one interested to buy digg for $200 million.
Nat
http://www.workersinc.com
I passed up on Digg a long time ago. There are many more alternatives to Digg, and it just doesn’t seem cool anymore.
You passed on Digg to create a feeble coupon site based on the Digg UI? Perhaps you passed on Facebook to invest in http://www.friendmenow.com?
How does/will digg make money?
advertising.
except that most people who use digg are tech savy, and were blocking adds back when kevin was spanking it into a sock.
Digg is a perfect example of a site that cannot expand and innovate. They can change the algorithms, they can change the UI, but they cannot change the elitist snobs that run the site.
What could Digg possibly add that would make it appealing and interesting again? It was no more than a Internet trend/fad that is now dying out. Digg absolutely sucks and these investment companies do not know a thing about investing in stable Internet companies any longer.
Traffic is dropping and will continue to drop. Once it drops really low, they can say goodbye to their advertising deals.
Kevin Rose has let the greed go to his head. Asking for too much money for a company that isn’t worth hardly anything.
Nah – Digg did good to pass up the Google offer, same as Xobni passing on the MS offer. Everyone sees it and says they’ve made a ball call or “there must be something wrong with their management/product/whatever”. TBH most of us reading this post have piss-all idea of what’s a good deal or not. You haven’t done the due diligence or seen the offer detail. It’s their business and if they decide to hold out for a better offer, then good on them I say. Rather that than have, what is at the end of the day, a good product assimilated into a corporate monolith and lost forever (see “lookout” indexer for Outlook as a great example).
Secondly, delighted to see a major playing getting the opportunity outside the US. At last! More of this please everyone else.
call, sorry.
I think they need the money to get the bigger offices and live the commotion for
a while. Digg is good for funny images only, as of lately is filled with us elections news.
The issue with Digg is that everyone is using it as a traffic source and a lot of garbage gets posted there for no reason. The idea was to have a website where stuff interesting to the masses is promoted, not stories which are created with the sole mission to attract numbers.