the trouble is that fixing Digg means getting rid of the existing user base
Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
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Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#12From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...
That WSJ article attributes Digg's fall from grace to "rivals like Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc." and makes no mention of the Digg v4 redesign disaster. That was what did them in more than anything. EDIT: The story has been updated with a new paragraph, "A series of redesigns..."
It was going downhill long before v4 IMO.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#13> 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.
With my cynicism hat on nice and tight, it seems a bit late for that. Digg WAS, in its heyday, the best place to find and share online content. But as the management undertook on iffy decision after another, and as imitators sprung up left right and centre, it lost its place in the online world. Sad.
We have plenty of content aggregators now. The kind of people Digg 5.0 (?!) will target are probably more than happy finding their entertainment through Twitter, Facebook, and dare I say it, Reddit.
Having said that, I for one wish the new team all the luck in the world in trying to get the site back to its former glory, and I look forward to trying it out.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
WOW That is nothing! I am installing cisco switch gear as we speak that s worth more than that!
For a 4-letter domain I say it's quite a bit.
Digg is ranked 192 on Alexa. Its Google Page Rank is 8. And the name is very popular and it used to have a huge following. Once the media get's a hold of this story (well it already has), tons of people will visit it just to see what they do with it. Plus, they still have a ton of traffic, of course not as much as they used to.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#15The only reason it's $500k and not $0 is to save a small amount of face. Digg is losing money, and has never made money in its entire history, so it's going to cost Betaworks a lot more than $500k to take it over.
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#16I am incredibly skeptical about the plausibility of resurrecting Digg, but for 500k I sure hope they do. It was my first social media home and it would be nice to be able to go back to what it was; not a marketing front end for corporate prostitution. Fingers crossed, but betaworks seems to want to take Digg in the direction it should have gone during the v2->v3 upgrade.
Not a hope. And the fact that they are going to fold it into news.me to send links of articles that others are reading sounds retarded.
Oh damn, if they integrate that into news.me, they've shot themselves with a $500,000 proverbial bullet in the proverbial foot.
At this point Reddit can probably not be killed. The only hope that betaworks could have at success is a vanilla relaunch of Digg, minus the gaming problems and "advertising for hire" functionality. Remember Digg when Dragon Age: Origins came out?
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#17From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...
$500K? I cant still remember the first time I saw this cover: http://workbench.cadenhead.org/media/businessweek-kevin-rose...
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#18From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...
$500K is a steal for a well-known brand, and 2M-4M monthly US visitors (funny how Compete reports higher traffic vs. Reddit while Quantcast reports 1/4x the traffic of Reddit)
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#19I used to love digg in the early days. People point to the v4 revision as being the final nail, but they started wavering and losing the magic literal years before that.
FWIW, Pligg (the digg clone CMS) looks like it's getting a twitter bootstrap upgrade. I've been wanting to roll my own "digg/reddit/HN" for ages. Maybe now's the time. http://www.pligg.com/demo/
Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg
#20From WSJ: "The price was just $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said—a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Marc Andreessen." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437380457752...
"None of Digg's remaining employees will join
Betaworks as part of the acquisition."
what did they acually buy? The know how? The technology? None of that is revolutionary today. And there is no community on digg right now whatsoever (unlike /. which still lives its own life).
Maybe the name is worth something, but I don't really think that it matters that much.