Digg.com Sold To Betaworks For $500,000

New submitter MyFirstNameIsPaul writes "The once popular social news website Digg.com, which received $45 million in funding, is being sold to to Betaworks for $500,000. From the article: 'Betaworks is acquiring the Digg brand, website, and technology, but not its employees. Digg will be folded into News.me, Betaworks' social news aggregator. This is not the outcome people expected for Digg. In 2008, Google was reportedly set to buy it for $200 million.'" Update: 07/13 12:26 GMT by S : Looks like real number is about $16 million.

Comments

Re:Slashdot won't go for even that

[icebike]

Slashdot is very old when measured in Digg lives.

I used Digg.com a lot now I use Reddit.com

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Digg was good for social media. People would submit stories, and then the cool ones would come to the top. Apparently a minor problem arose with power users who could spam their friends with messages,"Digg this cuz ur my friend", and a lot of them would. These power users eventually started getting corporate sponsor to astroturf, and their friends were oblivious so they still got Diggs. The actual user base didn't have much of a problem with this as you could read user names and just ignore them. I think the proper solution was to allow people to permanently ignore user posts, then power user spam would have been fixed.

Where Digg went wrong was,"We gotta beat these power users to their own game!" So they made it so users could no longer submit stories. And then your entire feed was all corporate sponsored advertising. This is equivalent of turning prime time television into one giant informercial. I know nothing of value is lost there, but in social media, this is a group of people moderating news and it was pretty valuable until they killed it thinking we're all bunch of sheep who will just sit there and read advertisements all day.

I'm glad Digg.com is dead. I just hope Reddit.com doesn't pull something stupid too.

Re:Look on the bright side

[evilviper]

The only way to make money in this game is to piss off the users as you slap them in the face with the reality that they aren't customers.... they are the product. Yet the sole reason a social media site exists is because users want to be there,

Every criticism you offer about online / social web sites could be equally well applied to something like broadcast television... And yet, they've been operating and profitable for a half-century now, with no end in sight, and the future looks fairly bright for them after the switch to HDTV, with only minimal potential for 'disruptive technology' on the horizon that could upset the good-old business model.

Google is making money giving stuff away, anyone else?

Yes: TV & Radio.

Re: I was a Digg user six years

[Lucas123]

Kevin Rose did everything he could to drive away long-time, loyal users, first by killing off any social networking aspect and then by revamping the entire site so that it didn't resemble the original or have any of the functionality that made it popular. It was idiocy gone wild. Personally, I think Betaworks just got ripped off big time. Digg's been going down the drain for two years now, and nothing's going to revive it at his point. Why do you think Rose took a job with Google?