News.Me to Get Supercharged by Betaworks’ Acquisition of Digg, The Original Social Media Site!
Digg, the original social media news site, has been sold to none other but Betaworks – the “incubator” behind News.me, Bit.ly, Chartbeat and Bloglovin. The focus stays with this since Betaworks announced on its blog that it’s going to merge what remains of Kevin Rose’s mighty creation with News.me, the news app and service that we have already wrote about.
Betaworks is not the only buyer. The Washington Post paid around $12 million for Digg’s talent in the form of experienced engineers, while LinkedIn paid an estimated $4 million dollars for 15 patents. Betaworks got “the rest” according to Gigaom – its core assets: the website, the brand and of course – the traffic which as of May is around 7 million visitors per month according to the Wall Street Journal.
For a site that once got a $200 million acquisition offer from Google, a fall from millions to 17 to 7 million visitors seems quite extreme, but the site’s founder Kevin Rose told the Wall Street Journal that on its own and with a smaller team Digg could turn a profit – it was making $3-4 million in revenue year after year even when Rose left.
Digg.news.me?
Even in 2006., Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was thinking of acquiring the then social media powerhouse. But Rose said that they just didn’t understand what they were or how they worked.
Will Digg remain a standalone site is a question by itself, although Betaworks says that they plan to develop a “Digg for 2012” – whatever that means. Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram believes the merger is also an attempt to reinvent News.me itself. The “Instagram for news” was first developed as an iPad application that gave you a news aggregator based on your Twitter timeline. Nine months later News.me released their iPhone app as well! The latest version introduced “reactions” or we might just describe them as emotions to aggregated content, such as “Wow” and “Sad”.
Digg has a database of more than 350 million diggs – or votes up (and countless burys) as well as over 28 million submissions, which makes for a lot of information that could help develope an even better recommendation engine for News.me – especially when you add Bit.ly’s links on top of that – Ingram thinks.
Betaworks says that they are going to build Digg for 2012, “turning it back into a startup” with a low budget, small team and fast development cycles. Lets see if that happens. As a site that usherd in the era of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook – it would be nice to have Digg – dugg up from the past.
