Digg sale: Problems included an unpopular redesign
The background
Social news site Digg has been sold for a reported $500,000. According to The Wall Street Journal, New York-based technology development firm Betaworks paid the bargain price for the website’s brand, website and technology. Launched in 2004, Digg allows users to rate news articles.
The technorati seized on the apparently low selling price for a site that was considered a pioneer of social media.
So what went wrong for Digg? There are more questions than answers, after some commentators took issue with the reported sale figure.
Was $500,000 the real price?
“Rumor has it that the price was just $500k, but that number doesn’t really make a lot of sense, given that the site still gets enough traffic to make more than that in a year by just selling ads,” pointed out Frederick Lardinois at TechCrunch. And AllThingsD reported that “Digg CEO Matt Williams disputed that figure, saying ‘the overall consideration is significantly larger,’ and that it was a combination of cash and equity.”
Tech bubble burst or one-off failure?
If accurate, the Digg valuation is either “a sign that the tech bubble just popped or the spectacular failure of a once very popular social network”, wrote Rebecca Greenfield at The Atlantic Wire. Digg struggled after a 2010 resdesign alienated users, Greenfield said, and also with competition from social networking sites such as Twitter and Reddit.
What’s next for Digg?
According to the Betaworks blog, Digg will be incorporated into News.me, with the idea of turning the site back into a start-up: “Low budget, small team, fast cycles.”
