Confusing Digg Numbers
Valleywag had an interesting article today about the conflicting traffic numbers that members of the Digg management team are giving out.
The confusion started when Forbes interviewed Digg founder Kevin Rose and Digg CEO Jay Adelson. In the Forbes article Adelson says that Digg gets about 1 million visitors a day and ten million unique visitors a month
Now 30 million visitors a month and 10 million uniques a month are very good traffic numbers. The problem with these traffic numbers is that none of the industry standard web measurement firms agree with Digg’s numbers.
According to ValleyWag, ComScore estimates Digg’s traffic for October at 1.65m people. That is for the whole month, not for one day! While comscore only counts US visitors I do not think anyone is saying that Digg is getting 90% of its traffic from overseas.
Andelson response is that classic. From Valleywag:
Adelson includes, according to the interview with Forbes, RSS hits. These syndicated feeds are downloaded automatically by news reader applications, and counted by internal stats tools, but often remain unread. Or, if they are read, a user will often click through on the link, which takes one through to Digg’s website. The internal stats would doublecount those visitors.
The Digg CEO, explaining why the Comscore numbers were under-reporting Digg’s reach, told Forbes: Well, yeah, 70% of our users use Firefox, which can’t even install the tools that most of the independent recordings are based on, so that will definitely impact the score. On this, Adelson is just plain wrong. It is Alexa that undercounts Firefox users, although it’s generous to geeky sites such as Digg, in other ways. But Forbes was referring to Comscore, which judges internet usage from a panel of over 60,000 internet users, and says it does include Firefox users in that panel.
It is conceivable that comscore is under reporting Digg’s traffic to some degree, but I do not believe that they are off by a factor of ten. What is Digg’s real traffic? We probably will never know, but ultimately if Digg is going to monetize whatever traffic they are getting they will have to use industry standard traffic data like that from comscore.
Filed under Social Media Optimization : Comments (4) : Nov 28th, 2006
November 28th, 2006 at 7:09 pm
What kind of sampling is that 60,000 users of comScore? Are they mainly older people (30+) or do they have a aggergrate sample of everything. Do they include geeks/power users or just average people? I have a hard time with numbers based on such a small (relative to the internet userbase) sampling.
Not that I don’t think Digg is inflating their numbers. I just don’t doubt it is by 90%.
November 28th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
I’m sure Comscore is underreporting Digg’s numbers. I simply can’t imagine Digg users participating is Comscore style market research in a representative fashion. That would be a good thing for Digg if they were trying to grow quietly, but if they’re trying to sell and prove how much their worth, accurate traffic numbers might help. Or, they could go old-school and base valuations on something like revenue and profits.
November 29th, 2006 at 8:53 pm
Paul and Ed, you both make good points about the accuracy of the comscore data. My point is that comscore is the source that everyone uses to set ad rates. Are the Digg users so unique that comscore cannot count them?
December 1st, 2006 at 12:12 am
I was very disappointed with the interview overall. First, Jay forgot to either take shower, or brush his hair before appearing on the show. And it just appeared, for a tech site, they were playing too much play-making. It was too obvious they were on the show to showoff their business to buyers. What’s with them showing Kevin’s signing some girl’s chest? On Forbes? Are you kidding me?