Digg has turned down a $100 million takeover bid

The owners of the Digg website turned down a $100 million bid for the company in 2006. The acquisition amount came from Currenttv, a media company that Al Gore is a part of.

The declined bid for Digg is described in the recently published book Once you’re lucky, twice you’re good: The rebirth of Silicon Valley and the rise of web 2.0 by author Sarah Lacy. The duo Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson, involved in the founding of Digg and both active on the board, got into talks with Al Gore in 2006 about a possible takeover of the popular links site.

The two initially liked the attitude of the former presidential candidate during the negotiation rounds, but after Gore showed a Powerpoint presentation in which the Currenttv logo merged with Digg’s logo, Rose and Adelson dismissed the $ 100 million takeover bid. Rose is said to have continuously seen the Digg logo projected onto Gore’s forehead during the negotiations. This sight would have struck the wrong chord with the Digg CEO, as Lacy graphically describes the takeover talks.

Although the Digg soap opera, in which various companies are trying to take over the successful website, is still running, Currenttv’s chapter was not yet publicly known, so reports Tech crunch. In 2005, internet entrepreneur Jason Calacanis offered $ 4 million for the website, while Yahoo wanted to pay $ 30 million a year later for the ‘web 2.0 phenomenon’. At the time of the offer, Digg was attracting more than one million unique visitors per month, and currently the number of visitors is said to be more than 13.3 million per month, according to figures from Comscore. Kevin Rose would like to see a minimum of $ 200 million and both Microsoft and Google would have expressed interest in an acquisition.