Digg Announces Significant Expansion Plans Fueled by $28.7 Million Series C Round of Funding
Wednesday September 24, 1:00 pm ET Digg Surpasses 30 Million Unique Monthly Users, Plans to Expand Globally and Double in Size Within the Next 12 Months SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Digg, Inc., the leading social news site, announced a significant corporate expansion program, including the doubling of the company’s staff, a move to a larger corporate headquarters and international expansion. Funded by a $28.7 Million Series C investment round led by Highland Capital Partners, the expansion comes at a time when traffic to the site has doubled in the last year to more than 30 million monthly unique visitors. The expansion represents the largest initiative in the company’s history and will include: * Hiring the staff needed to accelerate Digg product and feature rollouts, including more ways to consume the over 16,000 stories and other content submitted to Digg everyday, deeper category and topic content views, and additional ways to discover and customize content; * More than doubling the Digg staff within the next 12 months – from 75 today to over 150 by December 2009; * Kicking off Digg’s international growth strategy and plans to expand Digg into other languages; * Moving to a new larger corporate headquarters in San Francisco in early 2009 that more than triples the existing Digg headquarters space; * Investing in brand and market development programs; * Investing in publisher analytics and more sophisticated tools for publishers; “In just four years, the Digg community has grown into a globally diverse group of people who have a common passion to discover and share entertaining and relevant content,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “This round of funding allows us to accelerate that momentum and build the team to deliver features that will continue to change the way people consume content on the web.” Led by Highland Capital Partners, the $28.7 Million Series C funding also includes previous Digg investors Greylock Partners, Omidyar Network and SVB Capital. It follows the $2.8 Million Series A round raised in October 2005 and the $8.5 Million Series B round in December 2006. As a part of the funding, Richard de Silva, a partner at Highland Capital Partners, will join Digg’s Board of Directors. Highland Capital Partners has been the lead investor in such online
media and Internet companies as Ask.com, Lycos, MapQuest, Quigo and VistaPrint. “Digg has revolutionized the process of finding what content – across the mainstream media and the blogosphere – is valued by the community at large,” stated Richard de Silva, partner at Highland Capital Partners who will be joining Digg’s Board of Directors. “With its massive audience and the scale of the user preference data it aggregates, Digg is an enduring and iconic web property that has monetization opportunities that are an order of magnitude greater than other social sites.” Digg also announced that advertising revenue has nearly tripled over the past 12 month period, driven by strong advertising demand. As part of this expansion, Digg will also accelerate efforts to broaden media platform capabilities and advertising products. “Digg typifies the new generation of collaborative filters that are providing people with more efficient means of managing the abundance of online information available today,” said David Sze, partner at Greylock Partners and current member of Digg’s Board of Directors. “I look forward to continuing my close work with the Digg management team as they implement these exciting new initiatives that will build upon the groundbreaking achievements Digg has already accomplished.” “We started Digg in 2004 based on the concept of using a collaborative filter of a larger community to prioritize the overwhelming amount of material online,” said Kevin Rose, founder and chief architect of Digg. “While the growth of Digg has been phenomenal, Digg today still represents a fraction of our vision for where we can take this concept. This expansion and funding will help us get there faster.” About Digg With approximately 30 million unique visitors a month, Digg is the leading destination for people to discover and share the best content from anywhere on the web. From the largest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best content as voted on by the community.