Don't Digg This

Digg, an early pioneer in both online community news aggregation and social bookmarking, has been sold to Betaworks, which reportedly paid only $500,000 for its assets.

In a post on Digg’s blog, CEO Matt Williams said Digg will be combined with Betaworks’ News.me platform, which enables people to use iPads, iPhones and email to deliver stories shared by friends on Facebook and Twitter, a seemingly ignoble end for Digg, which preceded those social networks.

“Believe it or not, it's been seven years since Digg launched. To date, we've had over 350 million Diggs, 28 million story submissions and 40 million comments. We're extremely proud to have helped pioneer social voting on the Web,” Williams wrote, adding that he was leaving to join VC Andreessen Horowitz as Entrepreneur in Residence. He is being replaced by Betaworks Founder John Borthwick.

“Man that's pretty sad, but Digg has fallen. Lots of spammers on here now, unfortunately,” a Digg user, screen-named Badwetter, commented on the blog. The comment generated 31 diggs.

1 comment about "Don't Digg This".
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  1. PM Digital from PM Digital, July 16, 2012 at 4:13 p.m.

    Digg's end is really interesting when you consider the massive effect it had on other social bookmarking/ news aggregation sites. Think about it, Digg came before Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, and it doesn't seem like these sites are going anywhere. Why do these sites have better staying power than Digg? Here's our take on why: (bit.ly/Nx3pQl). Thanks for writing this--great article.

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