Digg sold for $16 million, to WaPo, Betaworks, LinkedIn
updated 12:30 pm EDT, Fri July 13, 2012
Deal more complex than originally thought
Expanding on yesterday's news that Digg had been bought by Betaworks, further details have emerged that paint a more complex picture of the Digg sale. New and expanded information reveal that not only did The Washington Post Company play a part in Digg's sale, as was previously known, but professional networking site LinkedIn also acquired a portion of the fallen social news site. The newest information brings with it a recalculation of Digg's total selling price; all told, the site is thought to have gone for around $16 million.
The news reported yesterday centered largely on Betaworks, which purchased Digg's domain, code, data, and traffic for what was initially reported as $500,000 but may have been as high as $725,000. Betaworks will fold Digg into News.me, an iPad-based news aggregator Betaworks developed in collaboration with The New York Times, in order to relaunch the service in some form or another soon.
Nick Bilton, columnist for the Times' Bits Blog tweeted yesterday that Betaworks' $500,000 payout was coupled with "single-digit millions of equity in a new Digg/News.me entity."
In addition to Betaworks, though, LinkedIn is said to have paid between $3.75 and $4 million for about 15 different patents held by Digg. Among these was a patent to "click on a button to vote up a story."
As was reported yesterday, The Washington Post Company, back in May, hired away most of Digg's staff. Now,sources reveal that the staff acquisition cost the Post about $12 million.
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