Digg allows users to submit and vote on news stories to decide which ones should be promoted highest on its site; sending the most popular to its front page.
Digg has been sold to the New York-based technology group Betaworks and now Digg announced the news on its blog saying that it would be combined with the daily briefing service News.me.
News.me had previously limited its articles to stories shared by a user’s friends on Facebook and Twitter.
Digg said it had received more than 28 million story submissions, 350 million article votes and 40 million comments since it was launched towards the end of 2004.
It went onto become one of the 100 most visited sites on the internet, attracting fame for its founder Kevin Rose who appeared on the cover of Businessweek magazine alongside a headline saying “how this kid made $ 60m in 18 months”.But Mr Rose left the site in 2011 after an unpopular redesign caused a user backlash and a dip in traffic which was capitalised on by its competitors Reddit and Stumbleupon.
Digg’ s chief executive Matt Williams blogged:
“Over the last few months, we’ve considered many options of where Digg could go, and frankly many of them could not live up to the reason Digg was invented in the first place – to discover the best stuff on the web. We wanted to find a way to take Digg back to its startup roots.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal was worth $ 500,000 (£324,000).
