Buried: Digg Bought By Betaworks For A Fraction Of Its Former Value

It feels like MySpace all over again.

Seems like just yesterday Google was about to buy the hot-shot Digg for a reported $200 million dollars. But nay, today the NY-based tech firm Betaworks is purchasing the fallen giant for a meager $500,000.  

[UPDATE: Techcrunch is reporting that other portions of Digg have been disassembled and sold off.  LinkedIn paid between $3.75 and $4 million for nearly 15 Digg Patents while the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million dollars for the Digg team.]  

Betaworks plans on folding Digg into News.me Inc. according to the Wall Street Journal.

Started by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne and Ron Gorodetzky in 2004, Digg was once one of the premier social websites. During its run, Digg acquired $45 million in funding and entertained hundreds of thousands of users.  The downfall began with over-regulation, over-development and feature removals that made the site more about moderators than users.

(image courtesy of BusinessWeek)

The sale of Digg won’t bode well for the most public founder, Kevin Rose. Earlier this year Rose joined Google where he lasted just over a 2 months before leaving for Google Ventures.

Digg is one of a handful of now-defunct startups. Other notable failures were Pownce (a pseudo-Twitter) and Oink (real-time rankings).

For more information, see the official announcement from Digg.

About The Author

Greg Finn

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.