Digg is a organic news community started by Kevin Rose. There has been much speculation as to how much Digg is worth and whether or not it is up for sale. Rumors have it that Google is thinking of making an outright purchase of the online community. But is it a good investment? Will the community benefit from the sale? What does Google hope to gain?

In an earlier blog post about online community investments I described why purchasing an online community is not always the best way to spend money.

Digg is built on the underpinnings of the social news community and while there have been numerous "gaming" schemes put into play the root level is still made up of loyal "diggers". Will they gain anything from the sale of the community? Will there be jobs for them? Just how will they react to Kevin Rose becoming a multi-millionaire from their hard work? It is hard work surfing and linking to hundreds of websites and articles per day. Hard work that comes without a paycheck.

The big question is "what does Google bring to Digg?" the answer is nothing. There is absolutely nothing that Google can do to make Digg a better idea. Nor can they add anything to Digg that will make it more popular. What can Google take away from Digg? Well, they can kill the websites spirit and give all the Digg wannabies a chance to capture some of the limelight. They can bring jealousy and envy into everything that makes the social news community work. Complaints of selling out and of the new ownership not caring about the membership is a common thing after an aquisition and Digg nor Google can do anything deter this inevitable outcome. Google bought YouTube and brought legal aid, servers, user interface inhancements and a larger Gmail community to bolster popularity. All of which made the aquisition of the community similar to the Coca Cola buys "coke bottle collectors" mentioned in the previous blog. But buying Digg is more like Coca Cola buying the "coke lovers" community the mistake that can only be dismissed because it is Google and they have so much investment capital that the mistake will go unnoticed until rigor mortis sets in to the cold dead body of the Digg community.

This is where Microsoft has shown itself to be very savvy. They did not purchase Digg but chose to collaborate and to help out with developing an advertising system. Now this just may be what Google is out to do, gain inroads to an incredible advertising market. But in doing so they will be breaking one of the cardinal rules of aquiring an online community, "don't buy in hopes of making money off of the membership through advertising".

We will all just have to wait and see how this all plays out. But my prediction is that Microsoft will do something that it was trying to avoid. They will aquire Digg in a preventative move to save it from Google. This is because if they ever get their hands on Yahoo! the YPN will fit in perfectly as a replacement for their earlier contextual advertisement aggreement with Digg.com

Happy Publishing!

Ten years of experience in web development. Carl is looking for in employment as a Senior PHP/mySQL Developer in Stockholm.
Carl McDade - Systems Developer