"Digg the Web Property" sold for ~$500k which is tragic, good luck running that without a team.
The new info is that the "Digg the Team" was acquired for $12mil (whatever acquiring a "team" means, sounds like stock options executed and hiring packages all around) and bizarrely, "Digg the Technology Patents" were apparently worth about 8 times what the site is worth and went for about $4mil. I'm assuming that "Digg the Web Property" has some perpetual free license to the patents as part of the deal.
The Patent deal is probably overvalued as well (since it includes worthless patents like "click to upvote something", but probably represents LinkedIn trying to recoup some of it's massive lost investment. I wouldn't be surprised if the purchase value was an attempt to make the patents look like they are worth more than they are in prep for an eventual second sale to other parties.
All told, "Digg" sold for around 35% of its total investment, with 75% of that being the staff acquisition by WaPo, which essentially means that the actual "Digg" properties, patents, code, viewership, business deals, social network reach, ad network etc. was sold for about $4.5mil or less than 10% on the investment.
note that in a strange demonstration of why if failed as a social news site, the news of Digg's own sale has yet to show up on Digg's front page
The "click to upvote story" patent would be extremely valuable if someone ever found themselves in a patent dispute with Facebook. I can already see a lawyer explaining to jurors how a 'like' is the same as a zero length 'digg'.
Don't want to get in to whether the system should or shouldn't work this way, just that given the way the current system does work that the patent could easily be worth $4 million.
How is this feature any different from the old Everything2 engine which dates from the 1999-2000 timeframe? The PerlMonks system, built with the same engine around the same time, also had a "one click vote" on answers not unlike Stack Overflow only a whole lot uglier.
Facebook's "Like" is surprisingly new; I found a Mashable article[0] from the day it was released in April 2010. Digg, on the other hand, is surprisingly old[1].
the irony of that is that digg started as a site just covering tech! in fact one might say that it started to go downhill when it expanded their categories...
"Digg the Web Property" sold for ~$500k which is tragic, good luck running that without a team.
The new info is that the "Digg the Team" was acquired for $12mil (whatever acquiring a "team" means, sounds like stock options executed and hiring packages all around) and bizarrely, "Digg the Technology Patents" were apparently worth about 8 times what the site is worth and went for about $4mil. I'm assuming that "Digg the Web Property" has some perpetual free license to the patents as part of the deal.
The Patent deal is probably overvalued as well (since it includes worthless patents like "click to upvote something", but probably represents LinkedIn trying to recoup some of it's massive lost investment. I wouldn't be surprised if the purchase value was an attempt to make the patents look like they are worth more than they are in prep for an eventual second sale to other parties.
All told, "Digg" sold for around 35% of its total investment, with 75% of that being the staff acquisition by WaPo, which essentially means that the actual "Digg" properties, patents, code, viewership, business deals, social network reach, ad network etc. was sold for about $4.5mil or less than 10% on the investment.
note that in a strange demonstration of why if failed as a social news site, the news of Digg's own sale has yet to show up on Digg's front page