Betaworks picks up Digg for measly sum

Earlier today those in charge of social news site Digg.com signed over the company to the company behind Chartbeat, bit.ly, and more- Betaworks, for what's been tipped as a measly $500,000 USD. This amount makes the situation seem all the more dire for Digg as they've recently had struggles after founder Kevin Rose joined Google (and some would say before). Betaworks will have its own founder John Borthwick becoming the new CEO of Digg while current CEO Matt Williams is downgraded to Entrepreneur in Residence.

This move has Digg letting the world know that they've tried many things in the past few months, coming to this conclusion to allow the site to continue to be what it always has been, a place to find the "best stuff on the web." According to Matt Williams:

"[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. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots." – Williams

A Betaworks comment on the situation has them promising to "build Digg for 2012."

Digg's current employees other than those already mentioned above seem to be out – News.me's current team will be taking over the digital management of Digg.com while a new "cloud-based version of Digg" will work with News.me iPhone and iPad apps. Have a peek at our timeline below to see how Digg has gotten to this point on the map.

[via Digg]