BuySellAds, a Boston-based advertising tech company founded in 2008, has acquired a majority stake in Digg, a news aggregator website that presents itself as "the homepage of the Internet."
Startup studio Betaworks, which acquired a part of Digg in 2012, will maintain a minority stake, a spokesperson for BuySellAds told BostInno.
"We originally set out to obtain a sales exclusivity deal with Digg for access to its ad inventory," the company's spokesperson wrote in an email, confirming the deal. "Our sales team has a lot of experience working with the types of audiences that Digg has curated. It didn’t take long for us to realize that there was a much bigger opportunity for BuySellAds and Betaworks."
The company bought Digg’s assets, as well as its editorial and revenue teams, from Betaworks for an undisclosed amount, Fast Company reported, citing a confirmation from BuySellAds CEO Todd Garland.
"We feel [Digg is] a great property," he told Fast Company. "It attracts a crowd that is like an internet subculture, in a way."
He added that Digg is still editorially independent, and said BuySellAds plans to streamline Digg and build up its ad stack.
With a main office in Boston and a distributed team spread out across the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia, BuySellAds is "a privately held, proudly bootstrapped company" that said it serves 1,200 publishers and 4,500 marketers.
The news of a reported acquisition came only a month after Digg shut down its RSS platform, Digg Reader.
Launched in 2004, Digg was once one of the most trafficked sites on the Web, generating nearly 30 million unique monthly visitors at its peak in early 2010. However, the business soon started to flounder and was sold in three parts in 2012 — with its site and technology going to Betaworks, a collection of patents going to LinkedIn and a team of engineers going to the Washington Post’s SocialCode property.
In 2016, while owned by Betaworks, Digg raised an undisclosed Series C from media giant Gannet Co. Inc.
Digg has a New York-based team of 25 engineers, designers and editors — but Fast Company reported that eight former members of Digg’s technology team have been hired by Civil, a soon-to-be-launched decentralized marketplace for journalism based in Brooklyn.
