Groking Digg V. NYTimes Numbers

Posted by: Heather Green on June 23

Publishing 2.0 did an analysis of how Digg is doing versus the New York Times using Nielsen numbers. This came after TechCrunch said Digg , based on Alexa data, is in striking distance of the Times in terms of page views. I like that Publishing 2.0 looked for another source of numbers, because frankly, I don’t know what Alexa is worth rather than simply showing trajectory.

Digg is taking off, no doubt. But I have one quibble with the analysis Publishing 2.0 does to reach the notion that Digg may soon have as many total unique visitors as the Times. It’s true, based on the Nielsen data, that Digg gets half as many daily unique visitors. But when you look at monthly visitors from comScore, the NYTimes has 9 million monthly visitors v. Digg’s 1.3 million.

Fun with numbers. Basically, it seems to me you have three sets of data here that could be interpreted in lots of ways. One way is to say that Digg has a fanatic group of fans who keep coming back day to day, digging and looking at a lot of page views.

And I am not saying that Digg won’t eclipse the Times in terms of unique visitors. I am simply saying, I don’t see the data there yet from these two resources.

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