Digg sold for $500K despite once being courted by Google in multi-million pound deal

SOCIAL NETWORK site Digg, once the darling of the tech community, has been sold off for a fraction of its once quoted value.

The site has been acquired by New York firm Betaworks in a deal worth $500,000 despite Google reported to be interested in buying the social media hub in 2008 for $200,000.

Launched in 2004 by then 27-year old Kevin Rose, Digg rose to prominence as an aggregator of online content, becoming at one point one of the more highly-trafficked stops on the Internet. The site let users vote up - or “Digg” - links, an early precursor to how Facebook and Twitter help spread “viral” content today.

The sale came after the majority of Digg’s engineering staff left in May for Social Code, a subsidiary of The Washington Post Co.

“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,” Digg Chief Executive Matt Williams said in a blog post. “We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its start-up roots.”

Digg’s website will continue to exist, and Betaworks will soon launch a new “cloud-based version of Digg” to complement its current offerings, Williams wrote.