Digg Sold to Betaworks For Only $500,000

Social news sharing site Digg has been sold to Betaworks for a reported $500,000 (£324,000) – a tiny fraction of what the company was once valued.

Betaworks has said that it will combine Digg with News.me, a service which delivers subscribers news stories shared by their Facebook and Twitter friends through an iPhone and iPad apps and a newsletter.

Digg had once been valued at $160 million (£104m) in 2008 and was rumoured to be close to concluding a sale to Google for an estimated $200 million (£129.5m) in the same year.

Betaworks Integration

“Digg has always been a site built by the community, for the community,” said Digg CEO Matt Williams. “Over the last few months, we’ve considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place – to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.”

“Today marks the next stage in Digg’s future,” he added. “Digg will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news.”

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick will be CEO of the new Digg and will soon unveil a new cloud-based version of the site to complement the current News.me applications.

“Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg,” said Betaworks. “Digg is one of the great internet brands, and it has meant a great deal to millions of users over the years. It was a pioneer in community-driven news.”

“We are turning Digg back into a startup. Low budget, small team, fast cycles,” it added. “How?  We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now. We are going to build Digg for 2012.”

Decline in Digging

“I’ve always been a fan of John’s product vision and the companies he builds, funds, and advises,” added Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg. “John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can’t wait to see what he does with Digg.”

Digg was founded in 2004 as a site for people to post links on the homepage so that others could vote on their choices to determine the prominence of stories. It attracted investment to the tune of $45 million, but has struggled since 2010 as rival social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become more popular. Even competing service Reddit has surpassed it in popularity.

“Both Kevin and I would like to thank everyone who made Digg’s journey possible,” said Williams. “Our amazing community, our talented employees who have developed the site over the past 7 years, the many investors who believed in our vision including Greylock, Highland, and Andreessen Horowitz, and countless others who have supported us along the way.”

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