Digg in acquisition talks, report says
Popular news aggregation Web site Digg is in acquisition talks with News Corp. and others, but no one seems willing to cough up the $150 million minimum Digg is asking, according to Techcrunch.
Instead, Digg is likely to close a $5 million or higher second round of financing later this year, possibly with current investor Greylock Partners, the blog posting predicts.
A sticking point in the negotiations is Digg's claim of 20 million unique monthly visitors, while comScore figures show the site with 1.3 million monthly U.S. visitors, according to Techcrunch. Digg allows users to post news items to the site and vote on them.
A News Corp. spokesman also did not immediately return a call. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose said in a statement: "After the YouTube buyout there have been so many rumors and speculation about the future of Digg that we've made the decision as a company to not respond to any of them. As always, we're focused on execution and cranking out future versions of Digg -- you can expect many cool new features coming very soon."
Techcrunch was the first to report that Google acquired YouTube in a $1.65 billion stock deal more than two weeks ago.
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor.
