Digg Sells For a Disappointing $500,000 – Buyer Hopes For Revival
The once popular website Digg has sold for $500,000 an amount far less than the $160 million it was once valued at. Digg was a pioneering social networking site which allowed users to share news stories and other interesting pieces of information however it was beaten at its own game by Facebook, Twitter and in more recent days Reddit.
The New York-based tech development company Betaworks has purchased the site in the hope that it can revive it and make the brand relevant again. The website did receive other higher offers from other bidders and technology companies however in the end and Betaworks were successful because those involved with Digg believed that it had the best roadmap for making the website successful again.
Despite its recent run of poor form Digg is still a well-known brand with its website attracting more than 7 million visitors each month. It is by no means dead however, if Betaworks wants to avoid going down the same road as MySpace they are going to need to make some radical changes.
Once predicted to be one of the most successful websites in history the website quickly attracted investors from Silicon Valley when it was a start-up in 2004. It was one of the first places people could post news and read news online replacing the need for conventional newspapers. The way it worked and the way it works to this day is that uses post stories which are then voted on and this determines the prominence of the story of the site. Obviously stories with lots of votes get posted higher and become more visible. In this way what the site is doing is Crowd sourcing the role of editor so instead of one person or a team of people deciding which stories should be the most prominent Digg relies on its thousands of readers to determine what’s newsworthy and what’s not.
This is not the first time that Digg has been on sale. In 2006 it was rumored to be looking to sell itself to Google for $200 million however the deal never eventuated. It was in 2010 that the website started to suffer serious problems caused largely by its rivals Twitter and Facebook doing what it did but doing it better. Digg tried to reinvent itself by re-launching its site in 2010 but this was not well received by users and only served to hurt the site even more. The popularity of Reddit was the final nail in Digg’s coffin as it offers a very similar service but since last December actually attracts more readers than Digg.
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