According to the Wall Street Journal, Digg, once one of the most popular sites on the internet, prior to changing to a format that many people found unpopular, has been sold to for $500,000 to Betaworks! To put it in perspective, the WSJ says Digg used to be worth more than $160 million!
As for Digg founders Kevin Rose, et al., it sucks that you lost so much money, perhaps due to ignoring the fact that many of your users hated your “New Coke” site. However, we’re sure you’ve learned a priceless lesson that no business school can teach, because there is no Brewster’s Millions School Of Business where the goal is to lose $160 million as fast as you can, so you can inherit $1.6 billion.
We wonder whether this actual machine that digs could have been bought for more or less than Digg. We also wonder whether the word in Swedish that sounds like a word for “gas” in English expresses the appropriate level of urgency of what may be about to happen behind that wall.
As for new owners, Betaworks, we like your name. It reminds us of Betamax and incomplete technology that often doesn’t work. We hope the new Digg works out for you, but in case it doesn’t, here are the 3 Worse Things You Could Buy Than Digg For $500,000:
1. 83,612 copies of Brewster’s Millions on DVD at Amazon. That’s almost twice as many copies as you could buy on digital download, presumably because DVDs are increasingly obsolete. The good news is that you can learn new ways to get rid of money by watching this movie, so you can apply that knowledge to get rid of the 83,612 soon-to-be-obsolete DVDs you just bought. Based on the numbers at the time of this article, you can give a free copy of this offbeat movie to everyone following Digg’s Offbeat, Movies, Entertainment, Technology, and Business “Beta” Newsrooms, and still have 3,011 copies left over to get rid of!
2. According to Celebrity Networth, $500,000 is the net worth of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Bubba Smith from Storage Wars. You can decide which celebrity would be better value than Digg, based on your political leanings, and whether you would like to opt for four more years of a Vice-President who has dealt with an economy facing numerous home repossessions or the repossessed storage unit that Bubba will offer you.
3. You can buy Diggs. According to this Wired article from 2007, you could buy a Digg for about a buck a pop. This more recent offer from 2011 looks like you could get two million Diggs, if our math is right. That ought to be enough for an entire day’s worth of “popular” front page news about the awesome negotiation skills the parties to this transaction had.
We wonder if Diggs will become a collectible item found in a Storage Wars bin in four years (hopefully not next to Joe Biden trying to mistakenly use a computer to Digg votes for himself in an election). Feel free, wonderful readers, to leave some Diggs below if you think they might become collectibles. Then we can try to sell them back to Diggs’ founders if the price per Digg ever recovers!
