Digg sold for the price of a 2-bedroom house in a larger city

Buy low, sell high. We all know that’s the ideal, right? Well, Digg.com ended up on a different path: Don’t quite sell high, wait a bit, sell shockingly low. Yeah, the once powerful content hub may have gone for just $500,000 to Betaworks. There are some reports that this was just the price for the company’s core assets and the final price may be higher, though not my much. Digg has been on the block several times and nearly sold to Google in 2008 for $200 million.

So what happened? Facebook happened. And Reddit happened. And the rest of the web happened. And Kevin Rose, the charismatic founder of the site, left in 2011. And Digg failed to adapt. And most of the staff was hired away by the Washington Post.
My point is: lots of things happened.

I hope no one from Facebook is high-fiving over this news because it follows a pattern of high-flying social sites being sold for a pittance after they fall from grace. Happened to Friendster, happened to MySpace. If you see a headline years from now about Facebook being sold for $40 and a can of beans, don’t be too shocked.