Digg Acquisition by Google: It’s Not Social, It’s Money

So Google is in negotiations with Digg to buy the social voting site for “around $200 million”. Now what? Of course, a valid question here would be why Google is still acquiring companies offering all kinds of services when it could have been much simpler to build a similar service of their own in a matter of weeks (and there are tons of scripts allowing to launch a Digg clone available already so this is hardly any problem at all). After all, this has already been done already by Yahoo! with Yahoo! Buzz and AOL with its unlucky Propeller that can’t seem to be able to please users no matter what redesign they offer.

But Google still seems to be fascinated with everything social, experimenting with voting in search results and talking to Digg about acquisition again and again. Obviously, there are lots of things that Google could do with Digg after such acquisition: for example, it could integrate the most popular stories into Google News and recommend certain Digg topics for subscription to Google Reader users based on their interests to get additional traffic to Digg.

But I don’t really think this round of negotiations is all about social perspective and user generated content at all. What I see here is an attempt to annoy Microsoft where Google can - and there’s no denying Microsoft will not be happy about termination of the three-year advertising deal with Digg. Obviously, now Digg will be quite a nice advertising property for Google itself. In addition, for Digg it is also the issue of distribution, not only advertising: while Microsoft could sell ads only, Google will also send extra traffic to the site - more traffic means more ad revenue, after all. So I don’t see any fascination with social voting on Google’s part - what I see is revenue potential and Google-Microsoft opposition.