Techcrunch Digg Does The Acquisition Dance With News Corp. Mike Arrington has a blog post out saying that Digg has been in discussions with News Corp. about them acquiring Digg but that Digg has been unable to get their minimum required sale price of $150 million.
This doesn’t surprise me. Digg is one of the hotest internet properties around. My only prediction that I made last year was that Yahoo! would acquire Digg. I still think that there is a possibility that this might happen as Yahoo! needs *something*, *anything* to turn it’s stock price around after an almost 50% drop since the beginning of the year.
As the YouTube acquisition showed with Google, the right acquisition can pay for itself with Google’s stock price increasing by more than they paid for YouTube after the news broke. Similarly the good news of Yahoo buying Digg could be enough to give Yahoo’s lagging stock price a boost greater than the $150 million price tagg for Digg.
Personally I think $150 million for Digg is a bargain still when you compare the market cap of something like The New York Times. Of course, Digg probably would have been a heck of a lot cheaper nine months ago.