Digg is being sold to Betaworks, the company behind Bitly, News.me, Chartbeat, Findings, SocialFlow, and BlogLovin’.
It’s no secret that Digg is not the shining star of the tech world that it once was, but according to the Wall Street Journal, the price tag was only a ridiculously low $500,000 dollars. For comparison, Facebook just bought Instagram for $1 billion.
Google was once in talks to buy Digg for $200 million.
Mark Cuban recently invested that much in a startup that nobody’s ever heard of.
For further comparison, the OUYA game system, a Kickstarter project, has raised over $4 million, with 27 days left to reach its goal $950,000 goal.
Here’s a random four-bedroom house in Lexington, KY that’s on the market for $534K.
100 of these hamburgers cost the same amount:
You could buy 2 Diggs for this bottle of coconut brandy:
Or this collection of video games.
You get the idea.
In case you don’t, according to Gawker, it costs more to obtain seven kilos of panda poop tea.
Digg CEO Matt Williams writes on the Digg Blog:
We couldn’t be happier to announce that the next generation of Digg will live on with the team from Betaworks. Betaworks is 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 will join a portfolio of products developed by Betaworks designed to improve the way people find and talk about the news. Betaworks founder John Borthwick will be the CEO of the new Digg.
Kevin wanted to share, “I’ve always been a fan of John’s product vision and the companies he builds, funds, and advises. John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can’t wait to see what he does with Digg.”
Coming soon, Betaworks will unveil a new cloud-based version of Digg to complement the current News.me iPhone and iPad apps. Stay tuned.
Betaworks had this to say on its blog:
betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg. Digg is one of the great internet brands, and it has meant a great deal to millions of users over the years. It was a pioneer in community-driven news.
We are turning Digg back into a startup. Low budget, small team, fast cycles.
How? We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience. The News.me team will take Digg back to its essence: the best place to find, read and share the stories the internet is talking about. Right now.
We are going to build Digg for 2012. More to come…
These days, Digg is getting 7 million unique monthly visitors, according to comScore.
Josh Wolford and Zach Walton contributed to this report.