Digg Sells For $500,000

[Heath]

http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/digg-sold-for-500000/

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. According to The Wall Street Journal, Digg took more than $45 million from investors since launching in 2004.

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. Low budget, small team, fast cycles.”

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. Poor reception led to plummeting traffic, changes in management and layoffs. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose left the company in March 2011.

UPDATE :
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/betaworks-acquires-digg/

In 2008, Google was reportedly interested in acquiring Digg for around $200 million, but walked away from the deal. That deal would have been a nice return for the service’s investors. In total, Digg raised $45 million from a number of SiliconValley most prominent investors since its launch. The last funding round – a $5 million Series D round – closed exactly a year ago. At that time, the site was still valued at around $35 million and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington reported that without that round, the company would have had only had about 6 months of runway left before it would have had to close its doors.

 

[Kw3rLn]

Thanks for the info mate.

 

[Mr Happy]

Quiet a bit of info missing in this post. It's sold for more than the $500,000 mentioned above and it's weird as it's being sold off in parts. This is the domain, code and traffic sale but the patents which are generally the most valuable part of a site were bought earlier for $3.5-4 million by Linkden.
It all wend down hill a few years ago when Kevin Rose the founder of the company left it. Imagine if Mark Zukerberg had left Facebook 5 years ago. Would it be as successful as it is now if it was run by bankers? Same thing happened MySpace after it's founder Tom Anderson left. We also have seen it loads of times on WJ. Lots of good warez sites aren't near as successful after the original owner sells them to some noob.

For anyone interested Kevin Rose who created Digg created loads of amazing and very successful products after leaving Digg. I've being a big fan of his for a number of years and he now works for Google, following his mobile company MILK.inc purchased, where he is believed to have taken his skills in social and mobile to Google Plus.

 

[Heath]

The sites patents were sold off separately from the site its self, which is why it actually did sell for $500k. Its a confusing way to do it, I know. Overall they made $16mil if you want to include everything else. Which still seems extremely low considering google placed an offer for around $200mil a while ago.