Digg is a social news website. It allows people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. News and publisher streams were added with Digg v4 in August 2010.
Quantcast estimates Digg’s monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Digg’s popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems; one of those competitors, Reddit, was ranked 64 places higher than Digg by website traffic analysts Alexa.com on July 16, 2012.
In July 2008, the company took part in advanced acquisition talks with Google for a reported $200 million price tag, but the deal ultimately fell through. Four years later, on July 12, 2012, Digg was sold in three parts: the Digg brand, website and technology were sold to Betaworks for an estimated $500,000; 15 staff were transferred to the Washington Post’s SocialCode for a reported $12 million; and a suite of patents were sold to LinkedIn for about $4 million.
Digg started as an…