Digg Sold for $500,000

This week, what remained of the former social news giant, Digg was sold off to the New York tech company Betaworks for $500,000. This was after The Washington Post paid $12 million for the Digg team and LinkedIn has purchased 15 of the patents Digg held for around $4 million.

Betaworks intends to use Digg’s domain, data, code and traffic to merge it with their News.me service.

Digg was launched in late 2004 and was designed to allow users to submit news stories and links, as well as let users vote and comment on them. Positive votes pushed the story up the page while negative votes pushed it down. The site was split into categories and because of people with similar interests sharing links, the users could find sites and news articles that they wouldn’t have seen without it.

This not only was helpful to users but to the sites who were noticed by Digg users, who could then view the sites at the source of the news, giving them more notice and traffic.

However with other social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook becoming more popular and it becoming easier to share links through these sites, the top story on Digg could be days old while on twitter or its rival, Reddit, news stories could be mere minutes old.

On top of controversial design changes Digg started to decline, shrinking the userbase and being quickly overtaken by Reddit in 2011.

With what was a popular social media site that used to be one of the go to sites to get noticed only three years ago. being sold for a fraction of the price it was estimated at that time, it’s much clearer that the internet is a quickly changing medium, and the places to promote your site today could be completely different to the places you promote it in two years time.

Which forms of social media are you using for your business? Did you ever use Digg for your business? If you want to talk to online promotion experts about improving your online presence, contact Innermedia.