According to a blog post on its site, Digg.com was just sold to Betaworks who will be folding Digg.com into News.Me which is also owned by Betaworks.
“We couldn’t be happier to announce that the next generation of Digg will live on with the team from Betaworks which will be combining Digg with News.me, a Betaworks company with an iPad app, iPhone app and daily email that delivers the best stories shared by your friends on Facebook and Twitter. ”
Digg launched seven years ago.
“To date, we’ve had over 350M Diggs, 28M Story Submissions and 40M Comments”
Digg has an Alexa ranking of 91 and according to Compete is within the op 1,100 sites in the world in terms of traffic.
And all of that is about to fall into News.Me.
As for the price of the transaction there are reports all over the place, one from MSBNC.com has the price at $500K, The New York Times has the price somewhere in the “single-digit millions” while TechCrunch.com has the total paid by several buyers somewhere around $16 Million
This is additional support to my post of this week that the future of the domaining and internet presence is is all about branding, as a huge site built on a .com is being bought and being incorporated into a .Me.
There was more updates today: Digg was sold for parts – http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/12/digg-sold-to-linkedin-and-the-washington-post-and-betaworks/
Strange the names like debrief.me and knows.me didn’t sell yesterday on Sedo: http://links2.me/~5RQ1$dE
500k – single digit millions for digg.com ? sheesh I would have paid more
can’t be that cheap
btw Mike, most people get .me and .tv as great brands
however the best ones are out and established
asll the new ones being applied for are somewhat trash
a few are pretty good and they may just be sat on
weird how Frank never got or championed .me or .tv and they are a thousand times better than anything he applied for
.com is the ultimate brand of course, but am open to a few established alternatives
there is only so much room at the table though, and this news does nothing for any of the new touted extensions. it is good news for .me
again if they manage to make it successful
most of the time when webistes get bought out, they sink
bad days for old startups 😐
The auction of .me didn’t pan out to well.
Not that the names were so good but still… What about inews.me? Worth getting?
If new blood doesn’t show up on the scene, then with all these new gTLD’s… the auctions wont do so well, expect of course the auctions for running those TLD’s.
Oops you mentioned new gTLDs vs .com…which means you pressed the Hot button..
In this thread before those .com nuts Jeff “I want $6M + equity for Usebiz.com” Scheider & Mugford (of Datacube.com fame. LOL) appear
Domainers secure in their holdings don’t need to rip on other gTLDs…
Only insecure domainers who are barely scraping a “domaining for a living” feel threatened by it
Well, few years back before the facebook bubble, digg was considered one of the most powerfull news mining mechanism which truly represents people choice. At some point Yahoo and other big media companies were interested in acquiring. Many companies copied diggs voting mechanism – like the one you see on top of this blog. During that time digg was valued around 200M but Kevin made a mistake by not selling it and was eyeing on 300M….and now single digit million sale !!!
it’s all about the hype. digg got some 45mln in dumb vc money.
look at how many sites adopted digg buttons. as they did with twotter, facebook, etc.
it’s all about the hype. getting vc money is easier than getting revenue. cash out before people realise there is no substance to the “business”. it often takes years for that to happen. eventually it does. exhibit a: digg.com
the internet is the greatest hype machine in history. the audience just keeps getting bigger.