DIGG
Rumor has it that Digg CEO Jay Adelson has hired Allen and Company, an investment banking firm to broker a deal worth $300 million or more. And InterActivCorp is one of the interested parties in an acquisition.
In my opinion, I think Digg is a great property for an acquisition. But the amount that they are looking for seems a little stretched.
I think this because I feel that Digg users seem rather unstable and are constantly being tampered with.
In the last couple of years, Digg has removed the listing of their top users, created a new social network that involves “Shouting Out” stories to other users (which seems more like spam to me), and even saw a major user revolt late April/early May 2007.
Digg users tend to be sensitive and over-express it when they feel like Kevin Rose/ Digg isn’t acting like “one of the people.”
Will Digg see an acquisition soon? So far it’s only speculation since there have been multiple opportunities for Digg to become acquired.
BEBO
The social network Bebo is also rumored to have hired a bank in order to either raise a substantial amount of funding or for an acquisition. Bebo reports that they have more than 40 million total users, of which 12 million are active in the UK and Ireland. Traffic has doubled since last year for Bebo. I picked up the rumor from VentureBeat.
Bebo is also working with Google on OpenSocial, an open-source developer platform to let third parties create applications on their own social network, similar to Facebook Applications. Bebo has reportedly seen itself being courted for an acquisition before, but none that have gauged its interest of a price-tag above $1 billion.
Social networks are a hot commodity, but with other social networks like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Hi5, and Orkut, the market is just becoming more saturated.
