Sun Valley and self-driving cars aside, the story of the day today is that social news site Digg has sold its remaining assets for $500K to the NYC-based tech firm Betaworks; While that number is indeed in the ballpark, we’re hearing from multiple sources that the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn.
According to a familiar source, the Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team and around the same period career social network LinkedIn paid between $3.75 million and $4 million for around 15 different Digg patents including the patent on “click a button to vote up a story.”
Betaworks picked up all the remaining assets today, including the domain, code, data and all the traffic for between $500k and $725k. We’re hearing that Borthwick and co. will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on the what it chooses to do with those assets. I have no word how on the “single-digit millions equity deal” some are reporting fits in here exactly.
Pre-acquisition, social news vanguard Digg had raised $45 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and other Valley notables. Digg was an extremely influential site for anyone who worked in the early era of online publishing, so it being scrapped for parts is sort of weird, especially for those of us who used to beg friends to vote up Digg stories.
Read more : Digg Sold To LinkedIn AND The Washington Post And Betaworks
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