4 Reasons for Google to swallow up Digg

By sahel • June 19, 2008

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It is no secret that the two iconic giants of the web, Google and Digg (although the later is relatively quite small), have started negotiations on what could be termed as another step for monopolisation of the internet space by the Search Ace Google.

If you look at the social bookmarking space, Digg undoubtedly emerges as the industry leader in this regard. Digg, the most popular user-generated news-discovery site founded in 2004 by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, has grown to its current 27 million unique monthly visitors and 250 million page views. Adelson says that Digg is poised to be profitable this year. It is no doubt that after becoming the video sharing king by acquiring Youtube, Digital Advertising ace through Doubleclick and feeds through Feedburner, Google definitely wants to become the leader in the Bookmarking space now with Digg. Apart from these, I tries my hand at analyzing 4 possible reasons what acquiring Digg would mean to Google.

1. The Del.icio.us fear- Yahoo already has Delicous, which is the second most popular Social Bookmarking site in the world, and Google currently has its hands empty. Now, Yahoo also has a product named Yahoo Buzz which is very similar to Digg. Acquiring Digg would mean monopolizing the Bookmarking space, which is one of the best products of the Web 2.0 world.

2. Advertising and Social Bookmarking Dominance - Apart from its motto of being not evil, it has a strategy of being and always staying No. 1 in whichever space it ventures into. Web 2.0 is all about sharing and getting traffic. Digg is all about news aggregation and bookmarking with a totally effective feedback system, Google can exactly know what users are up to, on the internet. As a giant in the internet advertisement space, acquiring Digg would also mean that Google would be able to track the behavior of millions of users very effectively. Currently Digg has a contract with Microsoft for providing its advertisements.

3. A better Search Engine - If Google swallows Digg, it would mean they could drastically improve their already almost perfect search engine. This is because Digg has stories which can be Dugg, shared and also buried. Google’s algorithm would then assign more weight to stories which are being Dugg along with the frequency with which they are dugg and also using a bury like system in their search results, it could actully mean a much better Google search engine.
That’s not much of a business model now but the back-end data (by Digg) will improve the relevancy of Google’s search results, which is worth a lot to Google.

4. A new step for Google news - Google is still trying to figure out what it needs to do with Google News since Digg has almost become the most popular user generated news aggregation website. In one of the articles by Valleywag, it was pointed out that Google’s Marissa Mayer’s goal is to use what Digg has learned to fix Google News which, while popular, doesn’t make Google any money. When Google news came into picture, it revolutionized the way the world looked at news now with Digg up its sleeve, it could possibly think of being a supplier of news the web 2.0 way - something which Digg has mastered.

Though there were of Google being a possible buyer for Digg and the price which they offer was $200 Million, the founder Kevin Rose said that he did not have a problem in selling the company. Although these stories started leaking out since last month only, it is only now that the Digg guys are possibly thinking of getting a rockstar CEO, somebody who could help in getting a higher price for this ace product. So for another of its acquisitions, the story is far from being over yet!!

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