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Social news site Digg
has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm
Betaworks. While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing
from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was
around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously
unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.
According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying
$12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, career social
network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15
different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote
up a story”.
Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets
today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between
$500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from
LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do
with those assets. I have no word on how the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly.
Pre-acquisition, social news vanguard Digg had raised $45 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman
and other Valley notables. Digg was an extremely influential site for
anyone who worked in the early era of online publishing, so it being
scrapped for parts is sort of weird, especially for those of us who used
to beg friends to vote up Digg stories
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