Digg overtakes Facebook; Both cross 20 million U.S. Unique Visitors
Written by Jay Meattle (contact - e-mail) -- June 20th, 2007 | Recommend ThisThe first time I wrote about YouTube, it had just crossed 20 million visitors in the U.S. Just 4 days after my post, YouTube was scooped up by Google for $1.65B in Google stock. At today’s stock price, the deal is worth over $2B.
There is certainly something magical about reaching 20 million. Web 2.0 darlings, also prime acquisition targets – Digg and Facebook both crossed this milestone last month.
- Digg edged out Facebook, with 2.3 million additional unique visitors
- Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace (on a percentage basis)
To size up the quality of these visitors, let’s go beyond unique visitors. Let’s look at some key site engagement metrics:
- MySpace is #1 across all metrics
- Facebook is #2 for all metrics except UVs
- Average stay on MySpace is 2x more time than on Facebook
Now take a look at the chart below. After a relatively slow start, Digg is now outpacing everyone else. Facebook is beginning to look up again after spending most of 2006 in flat territory. Both Digg’s and Facebook’s growth and expansion strategies seem to be paying off in a big way.
Let’s see how things look in six months. My Facebook invites are up 2x over the last month. Something big is indeed happening. Microsoft and Yahoo should take a long deep look at this as well.
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Posted under: Head2Head Battles, Online Video, Social Web |
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Get the 
June 20th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
http://www.google.com/trends?q=facebook%2Cdigg&ctab=0 and
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?site0=digg.com&site1=facebook.com&url=digg.com
tell a different story
June 20th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Where does this info come from? Certainly not Alexa.com.
June 20th, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Stay on Myspace is longer than facebook due to several reasons:
A) Pages view quicker (less advertisements asking me if I’m gay or if I would like to purchase various words published on the previous page).
B) All of your friends updates are published, no need to view 5 different pages to find out what (even your close group) of friends are up to today in the e-world.
C) There are much less bots to deny friendship to.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
The is great stuff. What I find fascinating is the Apple mistake Facebook continues to make. MySpace is huge b/c it’s big and open. Like the PC its OS is a disaster - 90% of MySpace profiles look like a crayon melted - due to the sliders, widgets, music,etc. In contrast, Facebook’s closed system has maintained a clean look and all but eliminated spam.. However, the closed system means handicapped growth. Facebook opened it’s registration late… places restrictions on connections and requires developers to produce functionality within its API ecosystem. I don’t get it… if we don’t learn from history we are doomed to repeat it.
With that said, Apple and MSFT have both been stellar performers, but we all know which one was the better early investment.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
See this comment on Digg.com
“”Facebook is growing 3x faster than MySpace.”
That is the most excessively distorted sentence ever. That figure was based on percentage growth. When you’re nearly 1/5th the size of your competitor, and grow a lot more PERCENTAGE WISE, of course you can say that they’re growing “faster”, but not in the actual sense of the term “faster than”.
And by that usage, I could say that digg is growing 48 times faster than MySpace, then you’d actually notice that that type of usage doesn’t make any sense at all. But of course, we’re a mob of myspace-hating people so we’ll accept anything that says something negative towards MySpace.”
http://digg.com/tech_news/Compete_com_Digg_overtakes_Facebook_Both_cross_20_million_U_S_Uniques
Also, average Digg stay is way off — I stay on much, much longer than that. Longer than Facebook and Youtube, so all these statistics are good for is a little estimate.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:06 am
oh! we might need a cluster of servers to accommodate that much of traffic :-) btw Digg is my favorite
Ervin
http://www.spaml.com
June 21st, 2007 at 10:25 am
@Mike: Duly noted. I’ve clarified in the post. On an absolute basis, in the past 12 months MySpace has added 15M UVs, while Facebook 9.5M
In terms of Average Stay — the metric was calculated for all 22.6M Digg users. I’m sure regular/registered users spend a lot more time on Digg. We will dig deeper.
@rahoorkhuit: take a look at - http://blog.compete.com/where-do-these-numbers-come-from/
June 21st, 2007 at 1:01 pm
i find this to be rather peculiar. I believe I associate with a rather representative segment of the population and while almost every person that I know that is 18-25 has heard of facebook and youtube, I’m one of the few people I know who have heard of digg. Are you counting hits from widgets on other people’s sites?
June 21st, 2007 at 6:03 pm
Wow that’s insane. I would think facebook would be worth more though really.
June 21st, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I am skeptical as well. Compete routinely under counts my site compared to quantcast, comscore etc… and my own internal (google) analytics. Both quantcast and google have pixels on my site and have similar numbers.
Either they are all wrong or maybe it is Complete. Interestingly qunatcast has facebook at the same 20MM, but only 6.9MM (more believable) for Digg.
It may be that Compete is hard at work wooing the Web 2.0 audience and therefore has better tool bar traction with Digg’s users. I’ll be most Facebook users have not even heard of compete.
Finally, it is interesting to note that am prompted to download compete’s tool bar if I want to have access to certain metrics that compete has.
June 21st, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Jay, this is interesting … as you know, we thrive on diversity and would be happy to add Compete to our other ranking stats at InstantBull.com. Great meeting you this week … drop me a line as soon as you’re ready with sub-domain support, we’ve had users request that we add support for your ranking stats too …
-Gal
June 23rd, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Where are these certain metrics, and where are you prompted?
Of course, I think that’s the a good thing…the more people with the toolbar, the more accurate the results.
June 25th, 2007 at 7:11 am
It’s one thing to talk about acquisitions - but what the investors really need is a revenue generation model. So far as I’m aware, sites like Digg are not turning a profit, and the revenue generation potential remains very limited at present. So what’s the carrot for acquisition? Simply traffic? There needs to be a better motivation than that, IMO.
2c.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Here Digg Scres the least in Avg Stays at 1.47 Mins. Looks like a bad metric at first glance, but this is what will beat all the others in a game where revenue is genereted by mostly PPC. In the PPC game, the sooner someone clicks away, the better. Lesser load on the Infrastructure, better CTRs.
One more thing, where Facebook/youtube/myspace visitors are direct URL type-ins, Digg today ranks well in Search Engines for many phrases, even better the original dugged pages in many a case. SE referrers have always been Ad-click happy..
June 26th, 2007 at 9:42 am
*Scores
June 26th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Compete has some serious sample bias issues. Check compete’s numbers versus HitWise, Nielsen NetRatings, and ComScore and you’ll see that Digg attracts roughly 1/5 of Facebook’s traffic.
June 27th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
@Brian Turner — true. but youtube was also leaking money like no ones business when google bought them.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:43 am
Very intresting. Digg is making huge growth.
August 12th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Forget Facebook. The new threat for MySpace is YUWIE.. you get paid when people view your profile. Clever idea, giving advertising revenue back to the user. You also get paid for the profile views of people you refer. Check it out here.
January 1st, 2008 at 12:02 am
Digg may be standing on its highest pedestal today, but of late I read somewhere that Digg is looking for a buyer with cash on hand worth $300 Million. It appears that Digg is not earning much revenues from the site.
April 1st, 2008 at 1:28 am
Check this out
April 9th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Yes I think Digg is here to stay for a long time.
http://bigloanguide.com
April 13th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Yes, Digg is a great site and has a lot of information
http://www.findanotherjob.com
April 15th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
It seems like it will be around for a long time
thanks
Sarah
http://bagdesigns.net
April 18th, 2008 at 12:38 am
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University of Dayton College Democrats
http://www.uba.org/
May 14th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Digg will be here for a long time
http://findadietplan.com
June 13th, 2008 at 9:29 am
Wow Facebook really is a great place to find great information.
I found information about loans and getting a government grant that was very helpful because I am trying to get out of debt and they had great debt relief options for me.