A big social croc Digg has been sold out to Betaworks, Linked In and Washington Post in shares. Betaworks paid $500K, Washington post $12 million and Linked paid around $4 million. This sale took place in different phases. Betaworks was the last one acquirer. On July 12th, it took into its custody the domain, code and all the traffic and will incorporate Digg into News.me. The current traffic on Digg’s site will be handy for a better startup by Betaworks.
Digg was launched in 2004 and very soon it became a gigantic social media site which offered social bookmarking services. The website was revamped a couple of times since it was launched. In Bigg Digg Shindigg conference 2010, Digg’s CEO Jay Adelson revealed a major refactoring of the site. The entire site was rewritten, its look and design was changed overall and many more new features were added. On April 5, 2010 Adelson step-down and Kevin Rose took over the position of CEO but not much later he started looking for the replacement CEO.
On August 25 2010, version 4 of Digg’s site was published which suffered from severe opposition from users since it had many bugs and lacked many features which they were looking for. Most of the users started using Reddit which is the Digg’s competitor. On September 1, 2010 Matt Williams took over the role of CEO in the stumbling position of company. According to some reports, Digg started its struggle to sell itself since 2006. In 2008 unsuccessful sales deal with Google also ended up because of Digg’s downfall. This raised turmoil among the employees further destabilizing the company.
With all these bad hits Digg still has about 16 million users per month. It might be the strategies which Digg took and they led it to this falling position. They should have developed ways to strengthen their team and work and especially users’ satisfaction. Competitors like Stumbleupon, Reddit along with others are still going in a strong position to cater the needs of users and eCommerce industry. Not everyone falls down like the way Digg has been. But it reveals a good lesson to other social media sites.
E-Commerce Themes 