Legit News
Digg Sells What Is Left to BetaWorks For Around $500,000
DIGG was once valued at $164 million and rumored to have been offered $200 million from Google a number of years ago. It might come as a shock to many that DIGG was sold for $500,000. That said they are pretty much buying the name and database as none of the current DIGG employees come along with the deal. The site was said to have 30 million worldwide visitors a month back in 2008. We took a peek at the companies Quantcast traffic numbers and in July 2011 they were getting 5.3 million US visitors a month and in May of 2012 they got just 3.8 million. This is a 28% drop in US traffic in under a year and far from the number the used to pull in. DIGG has an Alexa traffic rank of 191 right now, which still makes it one of the top 200 sites in the world though and why it easily brought in around $500,000. Don't feel too sorry for the guys over there as multiple sources say that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn. Rumor has it that 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, database and all the traffic.
Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the web. We couldn't be happier to announce that the next generation of Digg will live on with the team from Betaworks. Betaworks is combining Digg with News.me, a Betaworks company with an iPad app, iPhone app and daily email that delivers the best stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Digg will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news. Betaworks founder John Borthwick will be the CEO of the new Digg.
Posted by | Fri, Jul 13, 2012 - 06:11 AM
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