Next Up For Sale, Digg.com

Techcrunch reports that Digg.com is looking to sell the property for $150 million. Digg’s recent discussions to sell included negotiations with News Corp, and some other non-disclosed bidders. The word is that Digg wants “at least $150 million” but no one is willing to pay that much to them.

Specifically one of the reasons mentioned is because Comscore figures claim Digg has “1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April” but Digg claims they have “20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth.” Danny reviews Rand’s SEOMoz article named Website Analytics vs. Competitive Intelligence Metrics that concludes “no publicly available competitive analysis tool we’re aware of provides solid value,” including Hitwise or other reporting engines.

So does Digg have 20 million visitors? I do not know. It is hard to measure without direct access to one’s server logs and even then things can be spoofed. Advertisers and those looking to sell their sites always want to represent the highest numbers as possible here. But can you trust any of them? There are just too many variables and ways to fudge those figures.

Postscript: Matt Tatham from Hitwise sent me some recent data on Digg.com, so I thought I would add it here.

Recent US data on Digg.com in regards to their potential acquisition talks:
-Digg.com’s US market share of visits increased 231% comparing the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the week ending October 22, 2005
-Digg.com US market share of visits increased 176% comparing September 2006 versus September 2005
-Digg.com is the third most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media – IT category for the week ending October 21, 2006
-Digg.com is the ranked at 114 most visited website within the Hitwise US News and Media category for the week ending October 21, 2006
-Digg.com received 55% of its US traffic from Google for the week ending October 21, 2006

Thanks Matt!