Digg Sells Itself for Pocket Change: $500,000

Digg looked so promising 4 years ago, when Google offered to buy it for $200 million. A figure astronomically bigger than the measly $500,000 offered by Betaworks, a New York technology firm that is hoping to revive the flagging company to compete against the likes of CondeNast's reddit, which took the lead from Digg last December, and has held tight ever since.

While that number is indeed in the ballpark, according to multiple sources, the total price of the Digg acquisition was around $16 million, including the price paid for IP by a previously unreported acquirer, LinkedIn. The Washington Post ended up paying $12 million for the Digg team. Around the same time, 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. According to sources, Betaworks will license from LinkedIn whatever patents it needs to execute on what it chooses to do with those assets.