Digg has raised an additional $27.8 million from a funding round led by Highland Capital Partners. The company has now taken nearly $40 million from investors over the last three years.
Digg has been for sale numerous times and it’s likely this cash infusion is designed to make the site a bit more sophisticated for the eventual buyer. One of the rumored issues with Digg from a potential buyers perspective (think Google) is that the Digg back-end is easily duplicated making the site less desirable.
Digg gets over half of its traffic from outside the United States which is more difficult to monetize. To take advantage of this audience Digg needs to be available in the language of every major market and actually have local generated content. Of all the items Jay Adelson announced I believe expanding their relevance in international markets will be their primary focus.
In an announcement in the Digg blog, co-founder Jay Adelson said Digg is going to use the money to fund a “major expansion effort”.
A slew of new features in the works were announced:
– personalizing the Digg experience
– adding the recommendation system to all areas of the site
– creating deeper category and topic content views
– adding new ways to discover and organize content
– making Digg more relevant to local geographical tastes
– adding foreign language Digg versions
– initiatives aimed at expanding community outreach
– more sophisticated tools and interfaces for publishers.
Digg is also going on a hiring spree saying that they “will be significantly growing the size of the Digg team in the next year and moving to larger San Francisco offices that give us the room we need to do it”.
