Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Technorati 50 blogger, and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. He was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. His job description at Apple was “to protect and preserve the Macintosh cult by doing whatever he had to do” — how cool is that?!

Guy is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start (a must read).

A few weeks ago, Guy asked Stephen and myself 10 questions. We discussed how Compete competes with Alexa and Comscore, how Compete does what it does, site metrics, and Search Engine Optimization practices.

Enjoy! — Ten Questions with Compete (October 29, 2007)

The Questions (responses):

• What exactly does Compete do?
• What did your investors say when you started giving away your data for free?
• Do your stats include Macintosh users and Firefox users?
• How are your results different from Alexa and Comscore?
• Then should we all remove our Alexa bookmarks and replace them with Compete?
• Is SEO black magic and bull shiitake or can one increase traffic with a few changes to headers, keywords, etc?
• There’s often a 10x difference between my server logs and Google Analytics say is my traffic. What accounts for this?
• Then when people ask, do I give the log answer or the Google Analytics answer?
• Everyone else is lying, do I lie too or look less successful?
• What are the most common mistakes that companies make that yields sub-optimal traffic?
• Then what can I do to increase traffic at Truemors?
• In two years what will be the top five social networking sites (in order from largest to smallest)?

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.

For some reason, this is more exciting to some of us than our real birthdays!

Tell us how we can improve!

As we continue to invest in fine tuning and improving our products, metrics, etc. the most important thing to us is to be more useful to YOU. We’d like to hear from you how we can improve compete.com. Please leave a comment, or email us with your feedback and input. We’re listening!

Key Observations (Winners list):

• The Emergence of Content Sharing: 5 of the top 10 gainers having something to do with sharing content (YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg).
• Traffic to Facebook.com has increased by 14.6M, but hold on…traffic to MySpace.com has also increased by 10.2M during the same time period.
• AdultFriendFinder.com continues to thrive with nearly 24M unique visitors (up 8.8M this year), but look out AFF, Fling.com is catching up with you quickly. Fling has gained a whopping 17.4M visitors in the past 12 months to reach 18.7M unique visitors in September.
• Rebranding of Cingular to AT&T helped out ATT.com. All Cingular.com traffic is now channeled to wireless.att.com
• Digg has been growing faster than Facebook!

Key Observations (Losers list):

• Traffic declined to only 8 domains in the Top 50 (Sept ‘07).
• Two Amazon properties on the list - IMDB.com and Amazon.com
• Two Microsoft properties on the list - Passport.net and MSN.com. My guess is that most of their lost traffic went to Live.com, MSN’s new portal. Live.com is up 10.2M unique visitors during the same time period.

The Deloitte Technology Fast 500 recognizes North America’s fast-growing technology, media, telecommunications and life sciences companies in terms of percentage revenue growth over five years.

We’re pleased to announce that Compete ranked #164 on Deloitte’s 2007 Technology Fast 500, and 19th on the New England Technology Fast 50!

Click here for our press release. | Grab the entire Fast 500 list here: 2007 Technology Fast 500 List (591 KB)

Exactly one year ago I asked:

Will YouTube break the Top 10 within 12 months (~50 million visitors)? I think it is more likely that YouTube will hit that milestone than not. We’ll just have to wait and watch.

YouTube did it, and in record time. Faster than MySpace, Digg and Facebook. In June 2007 (within 8 months of my post) they broke into the top 10 with just over 50 million unique visitors.

Take a look at the chart below:

Now let’s take a look at how some of their other key metrics have performed under Google’s watch:

Nothing but good news here. Today, more people are visiting YouTube, they come back to the site more often, spend more time on the site each time they visit, and view more videos. All in all, Google is doing well with YouTube, and is managing to hold on to a good thing. However, I hope they keep doing more.