Digg sells for just $500,000, $174.5 million LESS than peak value

Oh dear, you’ve really gotta feel for the Digg team today. Once a web behemoth, the link-sharing site has sold for a fraction of what it had once been valued at. New York based Betaworks (who also own link-shortening service bitly) have grabbed Digg for a bargain $500,000 (roughly £325,000), a full $174.5 million LESS than Digg’s peak valuation of $175 million.

Betaworks intend to take Digg back to its start-up roots, running it as a “low budget, small team” on a “fast cycle” basis, integrating Digg with their mobile News.me service.

“We have spent the last 18 months building News.me as a mobile-first social news experience,” said Betaworks in a statement.

“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.”

Though at its peak Digg was one of the web’s key influencers, it quickly lost ground to rival Reddit, and to a lesser extent the quick-fire trends and link sharing of Twitter. Though still commanding some 16 million unique visitors a month, Digg has fallen foul to the same fate that claimed MySpace in the wake of Facebook’s meteoric rise.