It now appears that Digg probably won’t be sold to Newscorp and may simply go for another round of financing. If so Rose and Zuckerman over at Facebook may be sharing some pizza in a few years thinking “wow, we turned down HOW MUCH?” One uncertainty with Digg appears to be traffic. Comscore shows a small fraction of what Digg claims and Alexa traffic seems to support. However Alexa is notoriously unreliable, often showing huge swings where none exist and seeming to favor tech sites, probably because the toolbar Alexa uses to count visits is more often on the computers of tech people. For Digg, itself a high page view high tech site, Alexa is a questionable measure.
The Comscore traffic discrepancy is so huge that either Digg or Comscore’s credibility should be at stake. Not so in this new bubbling time where nobody seems to care much about the facts, just the hype. Like YouTube, Digg offers little of substance, a lot of page views, and not much revenue. They are lucky the pockets are so deep and the rationale so thin for these megabuck deals.
Joe Duck 