Thursday, July 19, 2012
The sale of Digg.com took place last week, at a paltry sum of $50,000, by Betaworks Technology, who is known for the creation of the URL shortening services, bilt.ly. Around forty five million dollars have been raised by Digg through its investors, since its inception in 2004 but the sale price is just a fraction of that amount. According to sources, Betaworks plans to combine Digg with their News.me venture which was launched in 2011. Through News.me people can receive regular newsletter which consists of content that is shared by their friends and followers on social networking platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Digg had been trying to sell the company from the past six months but Betawork’s acquisition at such a measly amount might not make owners of Digg very happy. Way back in 2008, Diggs were in talks with Google for the sale of the company at a jaw dropping figure of around three hundred million dollars, but the deal was not inked. The scenario changed completely for Digg in the last four years with the arrival of various other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
The end of Digg has not surprised many but the price at which it was sold to Betaworks, has got a lot of people talking. There were many other popular sites such as Delicious, Myspace which were axed with time but those sites did not have such a bad fall as Digg. Last year, Myspace and Delicious ware sold for thirty five million dollars and five million dollars respectively, which make it clear that Digg had a very raw deal. The meager sale amount also suggests that Digg was not at par technically with the other social networking sites and Betawork might have sealed the deal to popularize its new venture, news.me through the brand value of Digg.
In the year 2008, Digg reached it zenith by acquiring 30 million unique visitors every month but the number started to dwindle by 2010, with the popularity of Twitter and Facebook. Another reason for its downfall can also be contributed to the fact that the redesign of the site was not well received by its visitors. Last year, a site called Reddit which was very familiar to Digg became more popular, which was the last nail in Digg’s coffin. The sale of Digg coincidentally happened just after a bulk of its staff from the engineering team called it quits and joined a company called Social Code, which is part of Washington Post.
The chief executive of Digg, Matt Williams stated that during the last couple of months they could not find any option that would justify the birth of the website, which was done primarily to discover interesting things on the internet. John Borthwick, who had created Betaworks, will don the hat as Digg’s new Chief executive. According to Digg’s founder Kevin Rose, John has done wonders with sites like bit.ly and is sure that he will do something interesting with Digg as well.