(First published on the Compete.com blog on 11/08/2007)

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.

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 DiMarco 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)?

Akismet stats for the Compete Blog:

From Akismet’s homepage:

You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet. Automattic Kismet (Akismet for short) is a collaborative effort to make comment and trackback spam a non-issue and restore innocence to blogging, so you never have to worry about spam again.

They’ve nailed it thus far.

(published on the Compete Blog on 1-Nov-2007)

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

Tell me how Compete can improve!

As Compete continues 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.