Digg.com Sold to Betaworks for just $500,000

Social news aggregator Digg.com has been sold off for a surprisingly small sum of US $500,000. Digg has been acquired by Betaworks. Digg will be combined with News.me. In other words, Digg is more or less dead, atleast in the form we were familiar with. In recent years it had lost a large part of it’s ability to garner new users and also was criticized for being full of spam.

Social news aggregator Digg.com has been sold off for a surprisingly small sum of US $500,000.  Digg has been acquired by Betaworks. Digg will be combined with News.me.

In other words, Digg is more or less dead, atleast in the form we were familiar with. In recent years it had lost a large part of it’s ability to garner new users and also was criticized for being full of spam.

Digg Sold

Did Social Networks or Spammers Kill Digg?

Overall Digg has some impressive numbers. It had 28 million story submissions along with 40 Million comments.

The company in 2006 was valued at $60 million. So it being sold 6 years later for less that 0.5% of that valuation shows how fast the company declined in recent years.

In the past 60 years, Twitter and Facebook became household names as far as social sharing was concerned. Other companies like StumbleUpon and Pinterest also ate into Digg’s share or social sharing.

Importantly, Digg had increasingly become a hotspot for spammers. It was a system which could be fixed to get certain links more attention.

In the end a combination of strong competitors along with spammers on its own network has brought about the end of Digg.

What are your views on why Digg fell from its former glory? Do drop in your comments.

(via Digg Blog)

3 Comments

Rajan Balana July 13, 2012

OMG !! This is seriously unbelievable, Just for $500,000, Company valued $60 million six years back. The loopholes in the algorithm of Digg made it went down.

Rajnish July 13, 2012

I can’t believe they sold it for very little amount of money even the Skype was sold for $1.2 Billion !!

Ram Kumar July 14, 2012

Digg is still a famous name around. They could have brought it back to form as it was few years earlier. The price they sold for is really not worth it..