By John Tintle
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews
Today it is being reported that Internet start-up company, Digg (digg.com)has received 2.8 million dollars in venture capital from some big-name investors, including Omidyar Network, the outfit led by eBay co-founder Pierre Omidyar, Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, and Greylock partners.
Digg.com is a site that allows members to vote on News stories, to determine which ones get mentioned on their front page. The stories submitted are normally Technology related stories. According to the MecuryNews, Digg.com has 80,000 registered users. While a check of the member list only shows 54,443 registered users.
John’s 2 cent’s:
While I congratulate the guys over at Digg.com, I confused by the amount of money invested. Digg is a nice site, it is a different way at looking at news distribution, but how is it going to make money? Digg.com accepts donations and has Google Ads on it’s site, but I’m sure those incomes barely cover the cost of their servers and bandwidth. So how are these investors going to get their money back, much less make money off this investment. A post by Kevin Rose, Digg.com’s public face, posted the following as a comment to a story submitted on Digg.com.
The biggest problem we have faced so far is keeping up with growth. This gives us some money to buy more servers (just ordered 12) and hire a few more developers to help Owen out. Once we get rolling, expect to see new features more often.
And don’t worry, we still control the company. This wasn’t some kind of crazy takeover, just an investment by some cool folks that believe in the digg community.
..and no guys – I don’t get the money, it goes to the company to help us grow
kevinrose posted by kevinrose (51) at 09:00 AM 10/28/05
The only way I can see them making any money off of Digg, is to start offering features to paying subscribers, like Fark.com does with TotalFark. Well I guess investors haven’t learned from the previous dot com busts.
Source:
Mercury News via Digg.com
Digg (the ‘Slashdot killer’) receives $2.8m
John Tintle:
Today it is being reported that Internet start-up company, Digg (digg.com) has received…
Hmm..I dont understadn the investment $ either…seems a little whimsical to just throw money at something like that – unless they have a grand scheme??
Mike
BTW – I umm could use some ummm…investment..yea investment dollars also, for a project I am working on – something about getting every dvd movie ever made, and stuff liek that – so please donate at least 1million each..thank you and good night..err..morning
I beg to differ from the first poster. Digg ain’t no /. killer despite what everyone wants to think. We are all wired up on tech news but there are only so many hours in the day and I, for one, do not want to waste my time digging up the two bits of golden pieces of news out of the ton of childish digg stories, few kids with too much time has posted and made popular.
Even though the /. became nothing more than the announcement board of open source movement lately, it still has some value as I can relate to at least half of the posts there whereas none of the first page posts at digg was intriguing enough to even click the link in the last 2 weeks.
Digg is another fad fuelled by the young geek wanna-be crowd. As they mature, they will learn the value of time and then fad will go away or shift to some other medium adopted by the same crowd of that time.
It has been proven over and again, online ads are not sufficient to make a venue profiatble. And I am wondering what other methods of money making scheme can digg devise. Subscription model ? Naahh. Nobody from the crown who made digg what it is today, can or will want to pay for something as useless as this.
This may be the beginning of the second coming of the dotcom bust before it booms this time.
“I guess investors haven’t learned from the previous dot com busts…” you were so confused! Oh my Gosh!
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