Murdoch to expand social media holdings?

Posted by John Burke on October 27, 2006 at 8:31 AM

After buying the social networking site last July, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is rumored to be in acquisition talks with the social news site Digg.com. The MySpace purchase is generally viewed as a triumph as the sites traffic has quickly exploded, reaching the status of most viewed site in America in the summer of 2006. Digg currently ranks in the

According to Alexa.com, Digg currently ranks in the top 100 most viewed websites and attracts between 8 and 10 million unique visitors per day. This is a substantial amount less than the 20 million users that Digg claims it has.

Digg is looking to sell for a minimum of $150 million but has not yet received a satisfactory offer.

Buyers beware, what seems like a good purchase on the web could disappoint. Although MySpace is still one of the most popular sites in the world, rumor has it that users are starting to drift away. Some have predicted that social sites are just a fad so Murdoch may be getting in over his head. But many media organizations and bloggers have caught on to the social news trend by adding buttons to online articles to help increase traffic. Will they be a permanent fixture to our daily news intake or are they but a fleeting innovation?

Sources: Tech Crunch, Wall Street Journal