Digg sold for just $500,000

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Digg, the "social news" site which was once the poster child for Web 2.0 and valued at up to $175m, has been sold to San Francisco incubator Betaworks for just $500,000 (£324,000) in cash plus equity.

The sale of the seven-year-old site marks a colossal loss for its former venture capital backers, who put in a total of $45m during its life as an independent.

Digg reportedly still gets more than 16 million monthly unique visitors – but it has lost its ability to drive the direction of the net's interest as it once did.

Having once looked as though it could be the biggest driver of such social news, the site stumbled multiple times in trying to remake the way that users could vote stories up or down its front page – and lost its advantage over rivals sites such as Slashdot and Reddit.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jul/13/digg-sold-for-500000

[pam4water]

1. Didn't they shoot themselves in the foot by banning a lot off their users for life?

[limpyhobbler]

2. wow nt.

[PoliticAverse]

3. “the overall consideration is significantly larger"

Updated: Betaworks Acquires Digg (For Significantly More Than $500K)

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/

Update: Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads. Talking to AllThingsD, Digg CEO Matt Williams confirmed that “the overall consideration is significantly larger” and includes a combination of cash and equity. Another source close to the negotiations tells us that the price was indeed not $500k. We haven’t been able to pinpoint the exact price yet.

[progress2k12nbynd]

4. Even for those of us who generally agreed with most of their posts, the site got boring...

I stopped visiting about 2 years ago because it had gotten to the point where consistently the top 3-4 "stories" or more on DIGG were actually opinion pieces about something stupid a Neocon said, or how PBO is being framed for something, etc. While that was great for combating the lies spewed by the right wing, there's lots of other sites that do that, like DU. DIGG totally lost it's original purpose and had nothing unique to offer anymore.

[SomeGuyInEagan]

6. I had completey forgotten about Digg ... until I read this today in DU. n/t

[progress2k12nbynd]

7. Exactly! nt

[Skinner]

5. Looks like the real number might be around $16 million

Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.

According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story”.

Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do with those assets. I have no word on how the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/digg-sold-to-linkedin-and-the-washington-post-and-betaworks/