Digg Raises Money, Plans International Expansion
Digg has raised $28.7 million in Series C funding, which means bigger offices, a bunch of new job openings, and a more aggressive expansion. The latter will include international support, since almost half of Digg’s user hail from outside the US. This means localized versions, starting to appear in early 2009. My guess is that German, Spanish, and French versions are prioritized, for obvious reasons.
Om Malik reports a rumor that founder Kevin Rose got a chance to cash in, and took it:
The rumor I heard is that Digg founder Kevin Rose got to a sell a nice chunk of his shares in the company, a trend that has become quite fashionable among the Web 2.0 set. Several founders have taken money off the table as their companies wait for a bigger payday.
Good for Rose, of course, an probably not something to be upset about. I’d be more worried about the fact that 1% of the users generates 32% of the visits (stats from GigaOM). What happens if/when they get bored with Digg? That Facebook partnership might be crucial, but it might also prove just how hard it is to move from the tech savvy crowd, to the mainstream. And the former usually abandon ship when the latter gets in on the action. Digg is in for a bumpy ride.
Im interested to see that Digg has a much decreased price tag. Over at Crenk we previously wrote a short article about why they cant sell!! http://crenk.com/digg-why-the-hell-cant-they-sell-their-company/
Its a cool site. However, the new alexa data is terrible. The site’s traffic has been going down for over a year.
I brought up adding new profile functionality to some of the engineers there. (I was pretty excited about it). They just looked at me like I was stupid. My idea was probably lame. But — being uninterested in new ideas is a death nail to internet sites. Passing out liquor at digg nation parties wont generate new ideas — just headaches.
Digg is becoming a cult like site. Cult sites generally have the same (non ad clicking) crowd over and over.
Doubling the staff? Good luck interviewing there. Hint: Study up on oo design patterns and the Mysql optimizer. Oh, and if you aren’t prepared to do relational algebra on the spot, forget it.
But if you know these things, your better off at a company with a better traffic graph.
BUT! Thanks for the money! Ill have fun drinking it away at the next digg nation!