As much as I loathe rehashing news stories I’ll throw my hat into the failed Google buying Digg story.
IMHO Digg’s most valuable asset is it’s user data. It’s not a viable advertising platform, I’d wager 75% of the people who come to the site are using adblock or some other ad-negating software or plugin. I constantly see advertising for products like Horoscopes or Astrology which is completely mistargetting the Digg audience. While Digg has expanded the categories to target more mainstream users, the lack of moderation has lead to a hostile Lord of the Flies environment, where the average person is downright terrified to participate.
The only thing that Digg has that’s of any real value is the user data. The only person who has any real need for that is Google. Yahoo or Microsoft far too distracted. In fact watching the Yahoo – Microsoft possible buyout/merger is like watching Brett Michael in Rock Of Love trying to find true love … entertaining, but right now it’s never going to happen.
So who’s left who is interested in Digg?
If there’s one thing you can learn from facebook, it’s tons of users does not always = lots of revenue. In fact if the core of your user base sees the advertisng as an obstacle, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone it’s a good spot to be seen.
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Number of people using ad block is rising and rising. The major reason behind this is that advertisements that show up are totally unrelated. They are more of a obstacle in the path, then a resource. Unless we solve this problem the very free nature of web is in danger.
Digg drifted from the actual principles which it was earlier. It has become a platform only for SEO people to bring traffic to their sites and raise their rankings in search engines.
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