Mini Exit: BallHype and ShowHype Acquired for $3 Million

The husband and wife behind BallHype and ShowHype, two Digg clones that focus on baseball and entertainment news, have earned a modest pay day: $3 million from media group Future US. That’s not bad given the two never raised institutional funding since launching the first site (BallHype) in April 2007.

Users of BallHype and ShowHype (which launched in October 2007) vote up their favorite stories, and these stories hit the homepage page as they would on Digg, Reddit, or Mixx. But because these sites must cater to their respective niches, users can also view news from narrow topics, such as particular sports teams and celebrities (for example, you can get the latest dish on Amy Winehouse here).

Frontpages for news on the web generally breaks down into two categories: those created algorithmically, and those created through crowd-sourcing. In the baseball sector, the crowd-sourcing approach appears to be winning – BallHype attracts multitudes more visitors than BallBug, a sister site to Techmeme that surfaces baseball news algorithmically.

The size of this transaction was not formally announced but was made known to us by a source familiar to the deal.