We were trying to secure a sales exclusivity deal for a big property. Then we just got to talking with the folks over there and it made more sense for us to buy a majority stake in Digg. We were starting to see a lot of overlap with our advertisers spending money on Digg, and we have been wanting to move further into more consumer-y tech-type inventory.

A lot of people thought that this was similar to Viant buying Myspace. That deal, as I understood it, was largely around the user data. This is the complete opposite of that. Like, we really don't care about user data. We never have since the beginning of BuySellAds.

I can't tell you how many times we've been approached by data brokers looking to buy our data, and it's just such an easy "no" for us. Sure, we could probably make a few extra hundred thousand dollars a month. But the steam train that is the General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR] is coming down the track right now.

It is kind of like when browsers no longer allowed pop-up windows. It took a browser to get everybody else to clean up their act.

I actually love ad tech. I just wish that the past 10 years had more altruistic endeavors, that's all.

We're looking for other properties similar to Digg, and certainly the audience. Without a doubt.

I don't mean to sound hopeless for new media companies, but who wants to buy these things that need a lot of work to become profitable? We're lucky that Digg was not one of those companies. Sure, we're doing some work in there to clean things up. But I think there's a lot of other publishers that on the outside look amazing, but once you get down to them financially, they're probably a huge mess.