Digg website bought for $ 500 thousand

So the sad end came for one of the most promising startups in Silicon Valley, the pioneer of social media - 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 Digg alone raised investments of $ 45 million, and the share of 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 out” (dig), filtering out interesting and unique content. For 2004, it was a revolutionary idea, and dozens of Digg clones appeared on the network very quickly, and the 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, millionspublished news - almost all of this is a thing of the past. The Digg star rolled as fast as it caught fire. And it’s not even clear at what moment the turning point occurred and degradation began: either dozens of clones played a role, or the launch of more successful social media such as Reddit, which eventually attracted a mass audience, albeit with not entirely honest methods .

New Betaworks owners say they will turn Digg back into a startup : small budget, small team, fast development cycles.

The Digg site will continue to work, they promise to make it “the best place on the Internet to search, read and publish stories,” but hardly anyone believes in it. The main asset of Digg is a large audience (7 million unique readers per month, comScore), so Betaworks can simply use Digg to promote its more promising projects, such as news service for mobile devices News.me.

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