Digg sells for $500,000

When I read a headline along these lines I almost fell off my chair, $500,000 for one of the greatest and earliest content aggregation type websites – you’re kidding me? Apparently not, Digg was sold to Betaworks for just $500,000 plus equity.

A website that receives in excess of 16 million unique visitors a month and has a strong following, you’d never imagine it selling for so little. Betaworks said, “We are turning Digg back into a startup. Low budget, small team, fast cycles. How? We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.”

In 2008 the company was valued at $175m, that gives you some perspective. Of course, there’s always more to the story, we’re unsure of more details around the equity stake that Digg has received from Betaworks, but nevertheless, I was amazed.

What do you think they’ll do?

UPDATE:

Some more details have come to light:

Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.

According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story”.

Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do with those assets. I have no word on how the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly. via