According to Techcrunch's Mike Arrington (who was the first to get something solid on the YouTube sale) News Corporation is one of a number of companies courting the social news website Digg.com.
It appears that rumors of the upcoming financing led News Corp. and possibly others to initiate acquisition discussions with Digg, and the discussions were subsequently opened up to other interested parties as well. No formal written offers for Digg were tabled, sources say, because Digg's minimum sell price was at least $150 million.
One point of controversy was around Digg's claim of 20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth, whereas the Comscore's most recent September report shows only 1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April.
Does this mean NewsCorp are out to spend even more cash on web operations? Looks like it.
But, if it's true, then it's quite heartening to see that people aren't jumping in to pay silly money for websites that aren't probably worth such heavy investment (after all as good as Digg is, it's already been copied numerous times and isn't technologically unique). I'd imagine the sensible analysts and advisers are suggesting that Digg's valuation is much more like the cash that Yahoo paid for Flickr or Delicious, ie sub $50m. (Or suggesting that you pinch the model)
Do you think Digg is overpricing itself, or do they have something special?
