Once Shining Social Media Star Digg Just Got Sold for $500,000, Folded Into News.me

Before the reddit you know and love, there was Digg, one of the first prominent social aggregators that really blew up and took the web by storm. Unfortunately, rarely anything popular on the Internet is meant to last (just ask Myspace), and when Digg underwent a redesign a couple of years ago, there was a huge amount of backlash and the community lost a lot of users and steam. A lot of those users actually went to reddit, which helped catapult reddit into being the new game in town. Now, sadly, Digg has sold for a relatively measly $500,000.

A New York technology company, Betaworks, has taken mercy on Digg and scooped it up for the aforementioned $500,000. Betaworks is buying all that is Digg, including the website, the technology behind it, and the brand itself. Though Digg still manages around 7 million visitors per month in traffic, Betaworks plans to fold Digg into News.me, which is a service that shoots links to users that they’re Twitter and Facebook connections are buzzing about.

Unfortunately for the remaining employees at Digg, none of them will transition over to News.me. We send out our best wishes to those negatively affected by the purchase, and also send out some positive wishes to those at Betaworks that hope to turn Digg around. If you’re wondering what exactly happened to Digg, or if you weren’t consumed by the Internet back when it was popular, check out this stellar article we posted about two years ago when all the unfortunate Digg shenanigans went down.

(via The Wall Street Journal)

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James Plafke