According to recent Compete data, digg has overtaken Facebook in number of unique visitors and has grown 1400% in one year. Compete's May 2007 data states that digg had 22.6 Million unique visitors, while Facebook had 20.2 Million. Facebook still has many more page views, 11 Billion to digg's 250 Million - which says that Facebook's site is far 'stickier'. But the unique visitors stat is significant, as it suggests that more people visit digg than Facebook.
Source: Compete
If we compare this data though to official registered user stats from digg and Facebook, the story is very different. When Facebook announced their platform, it was revealed that they have 24 million "active" users. The most recent digg stats I could find were from a Kevin Rose blog post on 7 March 2007, in which he announced that Digg had just reached one million registered users. So while the Facebook data seems to correlate with Compete (approximately 1 unique visitor for each registered user), digg's data is much different. If Compete's data is accurate, then that means there are 22 unique visitors to each registered digg user. Which suggests that by far the majority of digg's users are not registered users.
Also, if you look at the growth patterns according to Compete's data, it is quite extraordinary:
Source: Compete
I find it all hard to believe - not only that digg has 22 Million monthly unique visitors, but also that they have more monthly unique visitors than Facebook. digg is still a very techie user base, whereas Facebook is seemingly far more mainstream. Or is it?
The above graph says that digg grew 1400% in unique visitors over the past year. That is hard data - and if we accept it is true, then the conclusion is that digg has succeeded in going mainstream. Remember that was digg's stated aim when it expanded beyond Technology stories in June 2006. Yes, one year ago. So has digg actually grown by 1400% in a year, since it expanded its content focus beyond tech? The Compete data suggests it has.
What do you make of this data? Is digg really more popular than Facebook?
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Richard - Have you considered Digg numbers from Compete might be taking into account all the little "digg this" widgets that are spread all over people's blogs?
I've seen that behavior with Alexa, and I can confirm that in Alexa's case, those widgets certainly count.
Posted by: RBA | June 20, 2007 3:01 PMRBA, that's an interesting point. The digg widget on this blog for example, when clicked, goes to the digg site. But then you need to be a digg user to actually 'digg' the story. So there's little incentive for non-digg users to push that button. And it still doesn't explain how digg has 22 times more unique visitors than their registered user numbers.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 20, 2007 3:05 PMIf Compete behaves as Alexa in this regards, you don't need to click the button in order to "count". Just the fact that http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js is called from your page would be enough. Again, that's true for Alexa because I've seen it happen first hand. I don't know about Compete, but if true, it would explain that 22x.
Posted by: RBA | June 20, 2007 3:14 PMyou're right RBA, sorry I mis-read your comment. I would think a lot of sites that use the digg button would have writers who are diggers tho. But that's just a guess, I have no data on that.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 20, 2007 3:20 PM@RBA: Given the ubiquity of the digg button across the blogosphere, I think if Compete's stats were behaving in this way, digg would be showing a lot more than 22m uniques.
Posted by: Josh Catone | June 20, 2007 3:26 PMIf you look at the average length of the stay in the chart, you notice that it is 1:47 for Digg against Facebook's 12:56. That implies that these unique visitors are visiting digg much fewer times, and when they do so, they're only staying to read a few articles.
Also, I often find that when I'm searching for a solution to a certain problem, I stumble over a Digg topic with the solution to that problem in the questions, while looking through the Google search results. Other non-techie users may have done the same, and then browsed away, never to see again. On the other hand, 50% of Facebook's members (as I remember reading, don't quote me on this) come back to login EVERY single day. If that's not proof enough that Facebook is indeed more popular (mainstream-wise) than Digg, I don't know what is.
Posted by: Ranajay | June 20, 2007 3:36 PMJosh, it's possible, I agree. The only reason I decided to comment on this was because as I said before, I've seen this happening with Alexa. If Compete doesn't get confused with this, it's indeed a good thing.
Posted by: RBA | June 20, 2007 3:54 PMIf Compete's data is accurate...
Does anyone still believe metrics from any provider?
The best thing that can be said about Compete is that is probably slightly better than Alexa data. I still believe that Hitwise has the best model for measurement - although I think the privacy implications of Hitwise's traffic monitoring are way under-reported. I find it amazing that anyone cares about Google saving searches when Hitwise buys the data on every request made on the internet from some ISPs without any protests.
Posted by: Nick Lothian | June 20, 2007 4:18 PM@Nick: Compete buys data from ISPs. Their approach is a hybrid one. ISP data (hitiwse), Panels (comscore), toolbar (alexa). Check the FAQs for more.
Posted by: JM | June 20, 2007 4:34 PMDigg is included in Google search results. Facebook profiles are not. Most Digg hits come from this.
Posted by: Doug Williams | June 20, 2007 4:57 PMQuantcast is showing approx 7M uniques per month for Digg: http://quantcast.com/digg.com, and 20M uniques per month for facebook: http://quantcast.com/facebook.com.
Posted by: Ian | June 20, 2007 5:32 PMYes I guess this is due to digg this button spread over all internet including big newspaper sites. Nothing is personally more viral than Facebook - MySpace otherwise.
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | June 20, 2007 7:42 PMCompete's data is based upon a panel of 2M users for which they have age, income, gender and geography. I think children may be under represented in the sample. This may be due to the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) where it protects the online privacy of minors (under 13). Generally, in the past when I see panel information I've found it hard to be representative of persons under 18.
Posted by: Stanley Wong | June 20, 2007 7:45 PMRichard - don't forget that Compete is U.S. only. I am working on a lengthy post about the issues with these public data services. I am working with Compete now to get the numbers on CN corrected. Currently they show that I get less than 10% of what should be shown.
Posted by: Allen Stern | June 20, 2007 8:00 PM@JM - yes, I realize that. But Hitwise locked a lot of large ISPs into exclusive contracts, so it isn't clear how much ISP data Compete has access to.
Posted by: Nick Lothian | June 20, 2007 8:31 PMI'll take page views over unique visitors any day.
Posted by: Ed Kohler | June 20, 2007 9:49 PMThose numbers can't be right... my evidence comes from the street...
If you ask 100 people if they've heard of Digg, my guess is that MAYBE 1% will say yes. Facebook, on the other hand, might yield 10%+ depending on where you are.
In other words, I still think Digg is in the 'web 2.0 echo chamber', whereas Facebook has gone mainstream. Those numbers indicate otherwise, which is unjustifiable in my mind.
Cheers,
Aidan
www.MappingTheWeb.com
Posted by: Aidan Henry | June 21, 2007 1:48 AM@Aidan: Ask how many people have heard of Nextag. Nextag has millions on users, and just sold a chunk of the company to a private equity firm, and were valued north of 1 *billion*. Most of their users were acquired via a lot of keyword and banner advertising, and natural SERP listings.
Digg shows up high in Google SERPs for a lot of term, which is probably driving much of their short visit traffic.
Posted by: E | June 21, 2007 3:27 AM#18 E - Don't get me started on the "why is digg in google" debate please... I wrote about it in Jan (click my name) and I still don't get it.
How many users click on my story title thinking they are getting my story, when they are actually getting a digg page and then I have to hope they know to click the title to get to the actual content.
I bet a good % of users drop off at the digg page, never visiting the actual content page.
Posted by: allen stern | June 21, 2007 4:26 AMI have to second the remarks about the Digg icons, etc. Look at every other stat for Digg, and it implies a very high bounce rate. People aren't finding the value on Digg that they do on any of the other three sites.
Posted by: Dr. Pete | June 21, 2007 10:36 AMDigg is clearly getting a big chunk of its traffic from Google. Which makes sense. Afterall, Digg is setup to be the ultimate scraper custom-designed to take advantage of Google. You get thousands of people posting to it with the lastest/hottest news. Then you've got all of these widgets pointing back to Digg pages giving it massive link popularity and page rank. Then to put the icing on the cake (if Digg's lucky) they get a lot of keyword-rich discussion taking place on the Digg link page which helps boost the Digg page's ranking even further.
The only site that seems to pop up more in Google searches (not counting Amazon or Ebay) is Wikipedia. As many people have joked, Google ought to just change the "I'm feeling lucky" button to "Just take me to Wikipedia."
Posted by: RustyS | June 21, 2007 3:03 PMFacebook is great. A great complementary application for GREAT bargains online is http://apps.facebook.com/cheaporg/
It’s basically a RSS feed that tells you the latest exclusive deals, coupon codes, freebies, and sales on the webpage. I hope this helps frugal students like me to save money.
Posted by: Amy Bowen | June 25, 2007 6:36 PM