Betaworks acquires ailing Digg for $500,000

Social aggregating site was worth a reported $200m in 2006

US-based technology incubator Betaworks has acquired the social aggregator website Digg in a deal worth only $500,000 (£322,850).

The $500,000 figure was reported by the Wall Street Journal as the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But it is a far cry from the $200m (£129.2m) that BusinessWeek had said the website was worth in 2006.

According to a Digg blog post, the company steered towards Betaworks as the other options considered did not chime with Digg's core mission.

"Over the last few months, we've considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place - to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its start-up roots," it said.

On its website, Betaworks confirmed that it had acquired the core assets of Digg and said it was turning the social aggregating site "back into a start-up - low budget, small team, fast cycles".

To do this, it said it would combine Digg with News.me, which has been developed over the past 18 months by Betaworks. News.me has an Apple iPad app, an iPhone app and a daily email service that delivers the top stories shared by a user's friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The Digg blog post said that Betaworks would be unveiling a new cloud-based version of Digg to integrate with News.me's applications

According to Digg founder Kevin Rose, Betaworks' founder John Borthwick would take over as CEO of Digg.

Commenting on Borthwick, Rose said: "I've always been a fan of John's product vision and the companies he builds, funds and advises. John understands the real-time nature of the web and how to capture and surface trends as they occur. Given his experience with bit.ly, news.me, and Chartbeat I can't wait to see what he does with Digg."