Digg Raises Another $28.7 Million

Digg has announced a new round of funding today to the tune of $28.7 million. This brings their total funding to $40 million. Digg CEO Jay Adelson notes that the funding will be used to expand the Digg team and move the larger team to a new office in San Francisco. Adelson also notes that currently they are at 30 million unique visitors monthly and that half of those users are non-U.S. Digg will put resources against meeting local user needs in other countries. There will also be investment into architecture - something I think Digg does a great job with.

The funding comes from existing venture backers Greylock Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and the Omidyar Network and was led by new investor Highland Capital Partners. It certainly seems like a lot of money - perhaps they are hunkering down for the potentially bad financial times.

Digg has seen many rumors floating around with regards to acquisitions over the past 18 months including Google and Microsoft.

Source: CenterNetworks

Google Snatching Up Digg For $200million?

The rumor mill has been running wild with speculation the Google will soon be buying Digg for a reported $200 million. The rumors began about a week ago when images on Web sites suggested Google was testing voting methods.

According to VentureBeat, Digg has been on the selling blocks since late last year, with an initial asking price of $300 mill. Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch reported yesterday that Google was in final negotiations to acquire Digg for “Around $200 Million”.

Feedback on the buyout rumors have been varied. Many long time diggers are concerned to say the least. Digg commenter Hiji writes, "This is the beginning of the end. In a few years all the major blogs and social-media sites will be owned by large corporations, putting us right back where we started."

For more interest remarks on the possible buyout check out the following Digg posts:

• Digg -"Google In Negotiations To Acquire Digg For “Around $200M"
• Digg - "7 Things Google should (and probably will)do if it buys Digg"

Digg Back In Service

One of our favorite news/social sites Digg.com was out of service for several hours this afternoon. The following statement was posted by Digg's Eli White on the Digg Blog

Hey everyone,

We know that we are currently having some issues on Digg at the moment. Submissions, commenting, digging and other actions may sometimes fail. We have a crack team assigned to it and will be making
numerous fixes as soon as possible to get Digg back to 100% for ya.

Please bear with us …

Eli

I'm sure we are all glad to see the Digg staff got things squared away and the site is back up and running smoothly.