A few days ago rumors abound that Google is close to acquiring Digg for a whooping sum of $200 million. This even prompted Loren to ask why Google would buy Digg for such an amount. Well, Loren can rest easy now as TechCrunch reported that the rumored buy-out deal has been buried – cancelled!
Actually, this decision to move away from the deal doesn’t come as a surprise, since Google has been dilly-dallying with its move to acquire Digg (yeah, sounds like the Yahoo-Microsoft deal). And last week was a deal breaker of sort when Google spent some time with the Digg team to evaluate where they would fit in with Google’s plans. Apparently, with this recent development, Google might have thought that the Digg team may be “too cool” to be part of Google.
Or maybe, Google finally realized that Digg has really nothing much to offer in terms of potential revenue, traffic, and even for Google’s online ad serving.
Where does this leave both Google and Digg? Google for one can concentrate on creating its own social voting/bookmarking service. While Digg, can always wait for new rounds of funding.
There, Digg loyalits and purists can now rest easy knowing that they won’t be seeing Google Adwords again on Digg.
