At $300 million - each Digg unique visitor is worth $16.30
Written by Jay Meattle (contact - e-mail) -- November 8th, 2007 |
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Is Digg close to a $300 million sale?
Good thing Digg didn’t sell itself a year ago. Digg has performed spectacularly in the past 12 months. All key user and engagement metrics are up dramatically for the site:
Now I know Facebook and Digg are fundamentally different services, it’s an interesting head to head comparison nevertheless:
- Even though Digg’s and Facebook’s unique visitor numbers aren’t that far apart, the engagement metrics reveal fundamental valuation driving differences between the two sites.
- Facebook users are much more engaged with the site. They come back to the site more often, spend more time, and view more pages. Most important - most Facebook users have user accounts, have to be signed in to use any Facebook feature, and voluntarily share lots of juicy facts about themselves with Facebook. This has to be the main driver behind Facebook’s lofty $620/unique visitor valuation.
- Interesting that both have multi-year multi-million dollar ad deals with Microsoft.
Will Digg get acquired soon? We’ll find out soon enough. Maybe Microsoft should use some of its $18.8 billion war chest (again) to buy a small piece of Digg in its bid to catch up with Google/Yahoo/Fox in the social networking game. After all, Microsoft already has a $100 million ad deal with Digg.
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November 8th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Alexa shows digg.com on a steady decine over thatpast 12months… what gives with ur analysis?
November 8th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
@steve J - Compete has a diverse sample of 2,000,000 U.S. Internet users (that come from national U.S. ISPs, Panels, etc) that have given us permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys.
Unlike Alexa, we go through a rigorous panel selection and normalization process that involves an independent RDD survey, demographic scaling and extensive QA from our data operations team. Alexa, on the other hand, has a single source of data — its toolbar — so it’s very susceptible to bias.
Check out this interview with Guy Kawasaki about Compete - http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/10/ten-questions-2.html
November 8th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Jay - the alexa data may not be as good yours, but it is undoubtedly statstically significant and shows the complete opposite trend as yours. There is a major problem somewhere. I gotta tell ya, i don’t believe any of you guys.
November 8th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Steve J-
Alexa data is nearly useless. The Alexa Digg audience is declining or the Alexa audience that visited Digg is deleting their tool bars.
Nielsen NetRatings shows no decrease in the Digg audience, but instead a 150% increase in the last 12-13 months from 2MM uniques to around 5MM uniques.
Do you really believe Digg has been declining the last twelve months in the middle of all this media hype?
November 8th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Scott
I have investigated other sites - ur right Alexa ain’t good data. But this data suggests that Digg is Facebook-like in its audience. And it’s nowhere close. I believe groing from 2m to 4m uniques, but i don’t buy 20m. These guys have been trying to sell themseves forever and now that the maket is white hot they are thinking bigger val.
November 8th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
$300-million? I could Digg that
According to Compete, traffic at Digg has skyrocketed over the past year — to 18 million uniques a month from 3 million, to 51 million vists from 4 million, and to 200 million pageviews from 10 million. Not bad.
November 8th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
@Jay,
Obviously compete data is immeasurably better than alexa’s but how do you reconcile the fact that Comscore has Digg at 11.5M monthly uniques and you are @18.5M? I’ve run a number of regressions on your data vs Comscore’s and the numbers are usually consistent with most sites, but with a few big sites like Digg you are DRASTICALLY beyond statistically probable.
November 9th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Each Digg unique visitor is worth $16.30
Is Digg close to a $300 million sale?
Good thing Digg didn�t sell itself a year ago. Digg has performed spectacularly in the past 12 months. All key user and engagement metrics are up dramatically for the site.
November 9th, 2007 at 11:47 am
@steve holt -
As mentioned in my previous comment, Compete aggregates data from 10+ sources, including ISP logs, ASP’s, toolbars, Panels, etc to form its 2 million person panel (I believe comScore media metrix tracks ~150k U.S. people). Compete goes through a rigorous panel selection and normalization process that involves an independent RDD survey, demographic scaling and extensive QA from the data operations team.
The diversity of Compete’s data sources helps identify and eliminate biases that show up from time to time in individual data sources. Our multi-source approach is a big point of differentiation — no one else in the market can do it — transforming more than ten different data streams into a common format and then performing statistical projections across 2,000,000 people on a nightly basis.
Follow this link to learn more about how Compete metrics are different compared to Alexa, comScore, Hitwise, Nielsen//NetRatings:
http://www.compete.com/help#snp2
And as always, feel free to contact me directly if you have more questions!
November 9th, 2007 at 11:53 am
How much is Digg worth?
East Coasters think $300 million is way too high, and West Coasters think it’s way too low. Compete’s Jay Meattle crunches the numbers and finds arguments for both sides.
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