Digg site bought for $ 500 thousand

This is the sad end for one of the most promising start-ups for Silicon Valley, a social media pioneer Digg.com . Yesterday it became known that the site Digg.com was bought by Betaworks for a miserable amount of $ 500 thousand , that is, 200-300 times cheaper than it was estimated in 2006-2007, at its peak. What can I say, if only Digg investment attracted $ 45 million, and the share of the founder Kevin Rose (the guy on the cover of BusinessWeek) in 2006 was estimated at $ 60 million.

If anyone does not know, then Digg was launched in 2004 and became the first site of a new type. Users published links to news (a very large number of links), other users voted to bring them to the main page, thus “digging up” (dig), filtering out interesting and unique content. For 2004, it was a revolutionary idea, and dozens of Digg clones appeared very quickly on the network, and the very idea of ​​“voting for articles” became almost mainstream in online media, and Digg came up with all this.

Millions of registered users, millions of dollars from advertising, millions of published news - almost all of this is in the past. Star Digg rolled as quickly as it caught fire. And it is not even clear at what point the degradation occurred and the degradation began: whether tens of clones played a role, or the launch of more successful social media, such as Reddit, which ultimately dragged on a mass audience, albeit not entirely honest methods .
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The new owners of Betaworks say they will turn Digg back into a startup : a small budget, a small team, fast development cycles.

The Digg site will continue to work, it is promised to be made “the best place on the Internet for searching, reading and publishing stories,” but hardly anyone believes that. Digg's main asset is a large audience (7 million unique per month, comScore), so Betaworks can simply use Digg to promote its more promising projects, such as the news service for mobile devices News.me.

UPD. In addition to the Digg site, Digg patents and the development team are sold separately to other companies. Read more here .