Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg • Hacker News Board

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#71

Post by Stenerson » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:49 PM UTC

lbarrow wrote: post #10

uptown wrote: post #2

From 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...

The WSJ's failure to mention reddit speaks to how little they know about the situation beyond the numbers.

"Newer social news website such as Reddit Inc. also stole some of Digg's thunder. Last December, Reddit drew more visitors than Digg for the first time, according to comScore, and since then it has maintained that lead."

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#72

Post by zethraeus » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:50 PM UTC

adventureful wrote: post #15

The 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.

If they're not taking on any of the employees, what are their costs? It's not clear that they're even keeping the website up or that it won't be a rather radically different product. All they've said is that it will be a 'cloud-based version of Digg' which means nothing.

It's probably a brand they're slapping onto something they already have in the works. How is it going to cost them a lot more to take it over?

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#73

Post by earl » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:51 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #23

adventureful wrote: post #15

The 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.

Digg bleeds money because they're overstaffed for what they do. Reddit ate their lunch with five paid people, while Digg was employing dozens. I think they had over 100 people on staff at their peak. Even now, when reddit has an order of magnitude more traffic than Digg ever had (1 billion+ pageviews a month), reddit runs with a staff of about 10 people. Digg probably still has a whole lot of dead weight, even at thi…

Yeah, but reddit appears to have been staffed with employees who worked all hours of the night and day for a salary; see blog posts from before reddit gold. That's not sustainable and unless you have a line on a set of really smart suckers who want to work way too much for the same money then can get elsewhere working half the hours or on call... you need more employees.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#74

Post by alaskamiller » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:52 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #65

alaskamiller wrote: post #41

Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday. First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale lin…

No it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

You're conflating two things. Reddit doesn't often break news, Twitter does that more in real time with its immediacy and reach.

Just like Hacker News is/was to TechCrunch, Reddit generates a news cycle, as in right now across the world there are cadres of journalists and bloggers using Reddit to source and/or get ideas on what to write and feed into the long tail.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#75

Post by arn » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

anewguy wrote: post #56

How much do you think it would cost to buy reddit?

Problem with buying Reddit is that you would still never really own reddit.

If digg's fall has taught us anything, it's that heavily community-driven sites are owned by the community. Try to make any major/unpopular changes in direction or business, and the entire site may come crumbling down.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#76

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 9:59 PM UTC

citricsquid wrote: post #69

blhack wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

The replies you'll get are "you make your own reddit, just remove the popular subreddits!" but you're right. reddit is usable for hardcore users that want to invest real time into their experience, it's atrocious for casual users (that don't care for the meme spam). There is a large hole that (new) Digg could fill.

[deleted]

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#77

Post by ot86 » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 10:00 PM UTC

alaskamiller wrote: post #41

Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday. First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale lin…

There's a great post by a redditor that explains how Reddit has become "anti-content": http://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circ...

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#78

Post by jshen » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 10:00 PM UTC

akanster wrote: post #5

uptown wrote: post #2

From 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..."

digg had reached a local maximum prior to v4 that wasn't sufficient for the amount of money they had raised.

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#79

Post by lazugod » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 10:03 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #61

alaskamiller wrote: post #41

Reddit won the game, slow and steady. Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. BuzzFeed? HuffPo? Gawker? TheDaily? Reddit, yesterday. First thing first is rescue the culture. Digg engineering already fled, the peanut gallery in the valley keeps squawking with delight about your failure, and all you have left is some nicely designed pages showing double digit gains on stale lin…

Reddit now literally powers the generation of news cycles across the blogerverse. I didn't know Reddit had their own power plant.

Is that a joke, or are you unfamiliar with the many definitions of power?

Re: Betaworks has acquired the core assets of Digg

#80

Post by justincormack » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 10:15 PM UTC

alaskamiller wrote: post #74

blhack wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it doesn't. Go to the front page of reddit right now and try to find me a piece of news. I see 2 items out of 25 links. One of them is a [linkbait title] story about wikileaks winning a case against VISA (in iceland). The other is about a Canadian supreme court ruling.

You're conflating two things. Reddit doesn't often break news, Twitter does that more in real time with its immediacy and reach. Just like Hacker News is/was to TechCrunch, Reddit generates a news cycle, as in right now across the world there are cadres of journalists and bloggers using Reddit to source and/or get ideas on what to write and feed into the long tail.

No thats not the case. Reddit is not that important. But Digg is dead.