Digg raises $29million for expansion projects
In a recent round of fundraising, the widely known news sharing site Digg, has managed to raise a massive $29 million to fund its future expansion…the actual sum is $28.7 million (but what’s the odd 300,000 between friends). This is actually no mean feat in the current atmosphere of restricted credit and certainly reflects private equity firms’ confidence in the company’s future.
In an act of far sighted strategic planning, Digg has recognised that the coming years are going to be very bumpy for all companies, with many destined not to survive. Digg, however, is determined that it will not fall by the wayside and has decided that the best form of defence is attack; the new funding will be used to finance a large international expansion of its business, with a majority of the money allocated toward expanded infrastructure and translation services for the new international sites.
For those not in the know, Digg allows users to share and then vote for news stories; participants vote selected stories up or down in the site’s online rankings with the effect that the stories become privy to a sort of ‘popularity contest’ but also become privy to a form of online ‘editing’ where participants ‘filter out’ those stories that are of lesser common interest.
It seems that this type of consensual populist news content is becoming ever more popular, as Digg’s own web statistics reveal that its audience has nearly doubled over the course of the last year to almost 30 million site visits per month: It is also perhaps indicative of Digg’s growing presence that its trademark ‘Digg this’ buttons are present on over half of the top 25 news websites in the USA.
If any company is set to ride out the current economic storm, it certainly looks as if Digg is set fair to do so.