Yesterday’s news that social media site Digg had been sold for $500K was both shocking, and not surprising at all. The news was somewhat expected at some point given the site’s steep decline in popularity and visitors over the past few years. It’s shocking because Digg used to be valued at close to $200M, and it goes to show that even giants of the web are vulnerable to complete and utter collapse.
It was announced Friday that the site, which aggregates content according to recommendations by users and was once valued at $160 million, was purchased by New York-based tech development firm, Betaworks. Talk show host Kevin Rose founded the site in 2004. Two years later Rose was on the cover of BusinessWeek with the headline “How this kid made $60 million in 18 months.”
In 2008, Google was said to be in talks to acquire the site for $200 million. The deal fell through and Digg’s popularity waned with the emergence of Twitter and Facebook.
Nearly every major outlet credits Facebook and Twitter with killing Digg. Though both are technically “social media” sites, neither has replicated the functionality of Digg’s vote-based news stream, but Reddit did, so to blame them for Digg’s demise is not correct.
Digg and Reddit were like warring siblings a few years back. Digg was the charming older brother, sending out millions of hits to stories that hit its front page with a lovely web 2.0 design. Reddit was its scraggly younger sibling, a confusing wall of white text and blue links that sent out far fewer hits.
But over time, Digg changed. Redesign after redesign unnerved loyal users. Finally, one new version, v4, was so atrocious that there was a mass exodus from the site altogether. The new site was a disaster both visually and content-wise, as “sponsored links” were thrust onto the front page and users felt like they were being packaged and sold to companies.
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