Digg sold to Betaworks for only $500000

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that social news sharing website Digg was sold on Thursday to New York tech firm Betaworks for a small fraction of what it was once worth.

According to the Journal, under the deal, which Digg confirmed closed Thursday, Betaworks is paying $500,000 for Digg's "brand, website and technology… for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors."

The sale for Digg's assets comes after The Washington Post's Social Code hired more than half the company's remaining staff in May.

In 2008, Digg turned down an offer from Google for $200M, according to Gizmodo.

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Time Magazine wrote Digg's Matt Williams said Betaworks founder John Borthwick will be the CEO of the new Digg.

"Coming soon, Betaworks will unveil a new cloud-based version of Digg to complement the current News.me iPhone and iPad apps. Stay tuned,” wrote Williams in a company blog post.

Mashable speculated the most valuable part of Digg is the once-hot brand name: "It may be hard to remember… but in a land before the mainstreamification of Reddit, Digg was the place to be."