The Last Podcast

Dotspotter, a Digg clone focused on celebrity news, has been bought for $10 million by CBS according to paidContent.

Obviously, $10 million is a lot of money for a site that’s only 10 months old. However, while most of us in the tech blogosphere might not be aware of the site, I looked at the compete numbers and just last month (according to compete’s data, at least), Dotspotter had more hits than TechCrunch and is growing rapidly:

While somewhat behind the scenes, Dotspotter also features a pretty complete social network. And while I don’t quite like the colors, I does actually have quite a number of useful features, as well as an interesting ranking feature, and a very active userbase.

How did they get there? alarm:clock has the answers:

+ They looked at gossip blogs like Perez Hilton and The Superficial and realized the if those amateurs could get that kind of traffic doing gossip, surely some pros could match it.

+ They applied Digg to pop culture, thus aggregating other pop culture site.

+ They borrowed from Gawker Stalker to encouraged visitors to submit photos of celebs.

Mathew Ingram wrote a rather snarky post about the acquisition:

So, Dotspotter — which appears to be a kind of Digg for celebrity stories, with a user interface and site design that seems to have been designed by colour-blind gerbils — is worth $1-million for every month it has been alive. By that measure, a site like TMZ.com or PerezHilton (or Gabe Rivera’s WeSmirch.com) should be worth about $100-million — which, of course, would be insane (no offense, Gabe). And what kind of name is Dotspotter anyway?

I agree with Mathew that the site design might not be the prettiest (see the explanation for it here), but I think there is no denying the fact that celebrity gossip is big business and that Paris Hilton attracts more eyeballs than Steve Gillmor. It’s sad, but true.

As a digg clone, though, Dotspotter actually outdoes digg on quite a few fronts, especially with regards to its social network, which might be derivative, but how innovative can social networks really be at their core?