Gaming Digg costs $300 million, or at least an offer
Acquiring Digg costs $300 million, we hear. Learning how to game the social new site, however, only costs the time to write an offer. At last night's Founders Club party in New York — well-attended by executives from CBS, NBC, Disney, and IAC — one media suit inadvertently confessed as much. "Digg traffic is crucial for us," this exec said. So his team called Digg to ask how it all works. What can they do to get more items on the front page? "And they just started giving us all this really detailed information we never expected," this exec was overhead saying. Like how to avoid triggering the algorithm's ire by not having everyone in the company Digg a story until after a certain amount of Diggs, he said. "Only later we realized — oh yeah — it's cause we're talking about buying them."