The born-again version of the once great social sharing site Digg Inc. has raised a Series C round from Gannett Co. Inc., the parent company of USA Today.

Although the amount of the round was not disclosed, Politico reports that it was a seven-figure sum.

Digg itself became a standalone company (again) when it spun off from parent company Betaworks (which had acquired the site in 2012) and raised a $4 million Series A round in November 2015.

The investment is being pitched as part of a deal that will apparently see Digg provide USA TODAY NETWORK access to Digg’s data and to allow the network to increase scale, reach new audiences and to engage new content discovery and message products.

If you’re not 100 percent sure what that means, neither are we, but it would appear that Gannett is using Digg to expand its reach and to gain access to the systems Digg has built for content discovery. That is odd given that Digg is primarily a curated news service in that they use humans to make the final decision as to what goes up on the site.

“Our team looks forward to working with Digg as we continue on our journey as a forward-thinking and innovative media company,” Gannett President and Chief Executive Officer Bob Dickey said in a statement. “Digg has an engaged audience, an impressive ability to discover the best content on the web, and analyze content in real-time. Working together, we will be able to quickly develop new content discovery products and bring them to market.”

Growing?

We thought we might try to check in on how Digg 2.0 is doing growthwise. After all, at the time of their Series A round we wrote:

Digg 2.0 has seen steady growth and has become an interesting read for its growing number of fans and credit where due to Betaworks for taking a dead horse and resurrecting it from the dead, even if the horse now appears to be a cat with the same name.

Public traffic stats are never 100 percent reliable, so that’s the warning in advance because all the public traffic stats for Digg 2.0 say that their traffic has either stopped growing or is in decline.

Analytics from Compete suggest that Digg has stopped growing and was even down a bit in the earlier months of 2016, while Alexa (see warning above) shows that Digg’s global rank has declined from in the top 1000 sites online to 1,516th position. That indicates that it is declining in traffic.

Perhaps the new tie-in with USA Today might help boost Digg’s growth once again, or perhaps the company is slowly attempting to turn itself into more a data service company versus a news site.

Digg said it would use the new funding to accelerate innovation for content discovery products utilizing its powerful proprietary data, including integration with messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and Slack.

Image credit: Pixabay/Public Domain CC0