As we wrote about here, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that social-news sharing site Digg sold for only $500,000. In contrast, TechCrunch has reported that Digg actually sold for around $16 million, with about $500,000 to $725,000 in assets going to Betaworks, and about another $16 million in assets going to the Washington Post and LinkedIn.
This machine may be digging for $15.5 million secretly buried behind this wall, that the media may have missed. Or maybe not.
Hey, even Monopoly‘s Rich Uncle Pennybags knows that confirming the accuracy of numbers is important if you don’t want to get a hernia lugging 32 times the pennies you expected toward the slots on Atlantic City’s boardwalk! While we don’t know who, if anybody, is right, if you were a former owner of Digg and slightly disappointed that the media may have underreported the value of the sale of your company, remember, it could be worse, here are:
3 Worse Inconsistent Numbers The Media Could Report Digg Sold For
(i) $9.99. That’s the eBay “Buy It Now” price for a factory-sealed Atari 7800 cartridge of the 1980s popular video game Dig Dug! We understand that lots of headlines about how Digg “Dug its grave” could lead to this kind of error, especially on foreign language news sites where something may get lost in translation. But you need to do fast, accurate research, journalist peeps! In this kind of Dig Dug mess, if you don’t quickly figure out how to inflate and blow-up an underground dragon before it breathes fire on you, it’s game over!
(ii) 99 Problems. As any Jay-Z fan knows, determining whether this is a good deal depends whether you’re getting Jay-Z’s 1994-era problems like getting hassled by the police, or 2012 problems like “Will I ever break the Beatles’ record for most number one albums?” But let’s face it: Jay-Z’s 2012 net worth is more than the value of Digg, so you will get stuck with his 1994-era problems. This means you have to relive 1994, when the most popular music was not by Jay-Z, or even Nirvana, which you might have guessed. According to Billboard, the hottest song in 1994 was “the Sign” by Ace of Base. And now that “the Sign” is stuck in your head, you’ve got 100 problems!
(iii) 99 Luftballoons. Look, the market for German red balloons died in the 1980s, but even if it hadn’t: balloons are always a really bad investment. That’s why clowns turn them into balloon animals at parties instead of gold, Kristen Stewart movies, or internet social networks! The truth is, the only value of 99 red balloons is that if you blow them all up while you’re underground, you may get an all-time high score in Dig Dug.
