Rumor: Digg to be acquired by The Washington Post
With a history only fitting an Internet business, Digg has seen the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows, and everywhere in between. — We've received a tips from multiple sources that Digg may have found a suitor by way of The Washington Post.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time around for Digg sale talk. In late 2007 the company hired bankers hoping to fetch $300 million or more, a figure that never materialized amid a parallel rumor of a News Corp. deal that would have bundled Revision3. What followed was a long slide: the botched Digg v4 launch in October 2010 drew a public apology from the CEO, and by August 2011 user interest had eroded sharply even as the site experimented with features like Newswire.
Against that backdrop, today's report — sourced to multiple tips but unconfirmed — lands differently than the 2007 chatter. Notably, TechCrunch's same-day framing is 'the team is going to WaPo, but the assets aren't,' reading this as a talent acquisition rather than an audience purchase, which squares with the site's diminished standing even after a confirmed 35 percent pageview bump in January credited to Facebook.
First-order effects
- If the deal closes, Digg's engineers would move into The Washington Post's digital operation, giving the paper a built-in social-product team while leaving the Digg property itself without clear stewardship.
- The unconfirmed status means Digg's remaining community and partner publishers face immediate uncertainty about whether the product they rely on has a future under new ownership.
Second-order effects
- A WaPo acqui-hire would signal to other legacy publishers that buying a distressed consumer-web brand's people — not its traffic — is the efficient entry into social product development.
- Reddit and Facebook, already absorbing the audience shift away from Digg, would face one fewer independent aggregator competing for the same sharing behavior that drove Digg's January pageview spike.
Third-order effects
- The gap between Digg's reported 2007 asking price of $300 million and a likely team-only deal sketches how quickly social-news equity can evaporate when platform owners like Facebook control distribution.
- If legacy outlets increasingly staff up via acqui-hires of failed consumer startups, newspaper digital transformation becomes a talent market play — with the acquired brands themselves quietly wound down rather than run.
The trend: Legacy publishers are turning to acqui-hires of social-web teams as social news distribution consolidates around Facebook and other platforms.