Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: Good news, MySpace: You've just been eclipsed as the biggest bust of the social media era. 
  
 Digg, only a couple years ago the most popular social news site around, has been sold to Betaworks for $500,000, reports The Wall Street Journal. Its last round of funding, in 2008, valued the company at $164 million. 
  
 That means that Digg managed to lose more than 99% of its value in four years for its investors, a group that included Marc Andreesen, Reid Hoffman, Highland Capital Partners and Silicon Valley Bank. [Update: TechCrunch's Alexia Tsotsis makes a good point: When you add in the money Digg made for selling its engineers to the Washington Post Co. and its patents to LinkedIn, you could argue that the real sale price was $16 million.] 
  
 While MySpace was a bigger money-sink on a total dollars basis for News Corp., it at least managed to recoup 6% of its $580 million investment when it sold it to Specific Media for $35 million. And that's not counting the substantial revenues MySpace generated during the six years News Corp. owned it. 
  
 In the case of Digg, there's no autopsy necessary. Its traffic has been falling precipitously since 2010, when the site adopted a series of changes that its large and highly engaged user base rejected in no uncertain terms. Monthly unique users peaked in January of that year at 29 million, according to comScore, then rapidly began to fall. A relaunch that September meant to reverse the slide instead threw it into an uncontrolled tailspin, while sending a surge of traffic to a rival, Reddit. While that effect proved temporary, Reddit would continue to climb, eventually surpassing Digg in late 2011. ||||| Digg Inc., a social-media pioneer once valued at more than $160 million, is selling for the deeply discounted price of about $500,000, three people familiar with the matter said. 
  
 The buyer is New York technology development firm Betaworks, which is attempting to revive a news-sharing site that was outmaneuvered by Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. 
  
 Digg Inc., a social-media pioneer once valued at more than $160 million, is selling for the deeply discounted price of about $500,000, Spencer Ante reports on digits. (Photo: Getty Images) 
  
 Digg confirmed Thursday it sold its brand, website and technology to Betaworks. The price is a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including Facebook investor Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Inc. founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. 
  
 Digg received higher offers from bidders that included technology and publishing companies and start-ups but ultimately decided Betaworks had the best plan for reviving its brand, these people said. In May, Washington Post Co. hired 15 members of Digg's engineering team—more than half of the company's overall staff—for its SocialCode digital media subsidiary. 
  
 Betaworks is acquiring a website that still has a well known brand and sizable audience of more than 7 million visitors per month as of May, according to comScore. 
  
 BusinessWeek Digg founder Kevin Rose landed on the cover of BusinessWeek in 2006. 
  
 Digg was once one of the most promising start-ups in Silicon Valley. The website was founded in 2004 as a way for consumers to put together their own collections of news and other Internet content, rather than relying on the choices made by newspaper editors. 
  
 Digg users would post links on the site's home page, then others would vote on their choices, determining the prominence of the stories they posted. 
  
 "They were one of the first social media sites," says Kristina Lerman, an assistant research professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Digg and other social-news sharing sites. "They introduced social components like having friends and followers." 
  
 The site quickly rose to prominence, in part due to telegenic founder Kevin Rose, a former cable television talk show host. In 2006, Mr. Rose landed on the cover of BusinessWeek with the now infamous cover line, "How This Kid Made $60 Million in 18 Months," referring to the company's valuation at the time. 
  
 In the fall of 2008, Digg raised nearly $29 million in venture capital from Greylock Partners, Highland Capital Partners and other financiers in an investment valuing the company at around $164 million, according to Dow Jones VentureSource. 
  
 Over the years, the company was rumored to be in negotiations to sell itself several times, including to Google Inc. in 2008 for a reported $200 million. The deal was never completed. 
  
 For early employees with equity stakes in the company like Owen Byrne, the site's first lead engineer, the failure to sell the company was a huge disappointment. Mr. Byrne, who left the company in 2007, said in an interview he never got to "cash out and go live on the Riviera." 
  
 But the audience started to drift away in early 2010 when services such as Facebook and Twitter exploded in popularity, as users preferred getting article recommendations from their friends or people they followed. 
  
 A series of redesigns, some of which weren't well-received by users, also hurt the company. A site relaunch in the summer of 2010 triggered a backlash, with most users saying they preferred the old Digg. By the end of 2010, Digg's audience had fallen by more than half, according to ComScore. 
  
 Newer social-news website Reddit Inc. also stole some of Digg's thunder. Last December, Reddit drew more visitors than Digg for the first time, according to comScore, and since then it has maintained that lead. 
  
 In March of last year, Mr. Rose, the founder, resigned from the company. He is now a venture capitalist with Google Ventures. 
  
 Betaworks intends to fold Digg into News.me Inc., a digital media start-up that Betaworks launched in April 2011. News.me sends users links to news articles that their connections on Twitter and Facebook are reading and talking about. News.me, which uses an iPad and iPhone app and daily email newsletter, has about 10 employees. 
  
 Digg shareholders also received a very small amount of warrants in the combined Digg and News.me company worth a few percent of the new entity, said a person familiar with the matter. Digg investors are not receiving any equity in Betaworks, said the person. 
  
 The new combined company is very young and unproven and hard to value, but internally Betaworks values it around $5 million to $10 million, making the warrants worth a few hundred thousand dollars on paper. 
  
 None of Digg's remaining employees will join Betaworks as part of the acquisition. Chief Executive Matt Williams will join venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as an entrepreneur-in-residence. 
  
 Betaworks CEO John Borthwick will become Digg's new chief. 
  
 Write to Joseph Walker at joseph.walker@dowjones.com and Spencer E. Ante at spencer.ante@wsj.com |||||
Student:
Social media site Digg—or, at least, what's left of it—has been sold to BetaWorks for the bargain-basement price of just $500,000, sources tell the Wall Street Journal. The site, which allows users to post links and vote other submissions up or down, was once one of the Internet's hottest brands and was valued at $160 million as recently as 2008. But it became another victim of the web's fickle nature. It began to fade as Facebook and Twitter took off and large numbers of users deserted it for rival Reddit after a redesign in 2010 turned out to be deeply unpopular. Founder Kevin Rose quit the company last year and the Washington Post snapped up most of its tech team in May. Digg received higher offers but decided BetaWorks offered the best opportunity for reviving its brands, the Journal's sources say. The sale price means the company lost 99% of its value for investors in just four years, making it a bigger flop than even MySpace, Forbes notes. In 2008, Google was in talks to buy Digg for $200 million but it ended up pulling the plug on the deal. The company's first lead engineer, who had a large stake in Digg, laments that he never got to "cash out and go live on the Riviera."