Digg Sells For $500,000. Update: Matt Williams told The New York Times, “the price floating around is inaccurate.” While Williams declined to give a final price, he said that because stock was involved, "the total consideration is more than the value quoted.” It looks like the $500,000 price reported by The Wall Street Journal was for Digg's core assets. Digg's investors likely got additional equity in Betaworks and Betaworks-backed companies. How the mighty have fallen. The social sharing site Digg has sold for just $500,000 to New York startup incubator Betaworks. The small selling price just goes to show how quickly fortunes can turn for even the hottest web startups. On its blog, Betaworks says it is going to fold Digg into the News.me team. The company also vows that it is going to "turn Digg back into a startup. Since the release of Digg v4, dubbed "the new Digg" in the summer of 2010, the once-hot company has met with a series of challenges. Digg CEO Matt Williams shared the news to the Digg community .
Digg Sold To LinkedIn AND The Washington Post And Betaworks. 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. The Burying of Digg, by the Numbers - Megan Garber. The Big Digg Lesson: A Social Network Is Worth Precisely as Much as Its Community - Alexis Madrigal. A social networking company is not a technology company like Intel is a technology company; its users are its product. Digg has been sold for the astonishingly low price of $500,000 to Betaworks, the Wall Street Journal reports.
There are sad things about this and there are funny things about this. This sale, along with Facebook's IPO and Reddit's spinout, marks the end of the first era of social media. It is easy to forget how high-flying Digg once was. Digg was supposed to be the future of all media, not just social media. Here was the huge problem with the Digg system. The only way to consistently get stuff on the home page was to work at it like a job. Meanwhile, everyday users were realizing that nothing they submitted ever even had a chance in hell of going to the front page. In short, the community broke. There is one clear lesson from Digg's sale: the technology that powered a once-massive social network is worth about $500,000.
Kevin Rose: Digg Failed Because 'Social Media Grew Up' - Digits. Facebook Didn't Kill Digg, Reddit Did. Thumbs Up: Digg Wasn’t A Failure, It Was A Beginning. “Don’t let him climb a wall. We haven’t finalized his life insurance plan.” That was one of the first directions I was given at Digg when I started in early 2008.
“Him” was Kevin Rose, the founder of the widely popular social news site, and I was on my third day. It was widely known that Kevin was an avid rock climber, though he had recently been extending this skill to common household surfaces…walls, doorframes, stairways. He climbed the wall. That’s how it was at Digg. And voice we had…our company culture mimicked the outspoken, vocal nature of the 39M monthly users we were happily serving. Creating a culture is hard…it’s not something you can artificially build by putting posters up on the wall or having weekly in-office happy hours. The Digg team was passionate about being there, often because we were very active users on the platform prior to being hired.
We hired not just our peers, but spent time recruiting people we looked up to professionally. I left Digg over two years ago.