Digg
Google talked $200 million. Its brand sold for $500,000.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Shipped a redesign so broken that its users left for Reddit.
A BusinessWeek cover once read: "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months." In 2008 Digg's homepage drew over 236 million visitors a year and Google was in talks to buy it for a reported $200 million. On August 25, 2010 Digg launched version 4, full of bugs. Traffic fell by a quarter in a month. Reddit grew 230% that year. In 2012 the brand, the site and the technology sold for $500,000. In 2025 the founder bought it back, with a co-founder of Reddit. They opened a beta in January 2026, shut it in March over "an unprecedented bot problem," and rebooted it in May as an AI news aggregator. Some corpses will not stay down.