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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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?

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