(2006-10-26) Digg Deal

Digg has been in Sell Out talks with a variety of folks including NewsCorp. But they want $150M and nobody's offered that much yet, so they may do another VC round instead.

Fred Wilson defends ComScore's estimate of Digg's audience/usage. Now I am biased as I have been an investor in Comscore since 1999 and have been on the board since then.... Comscore counts real viewers in its panel, not cookies. Cookies get deleted by spyware removal software. If you remove your cookies once a week, you'll look like four users every month to someone using cookies as a basis for UVs. The more sophisicated a user base is, the more likely they use cookie removal. And that results in significant UV overcounting... My guess is that Digg has something like 5mm monthly unique visitors worldwide. Not 20mm. The difference probably results from cookie counting, multiple browsers, and a few other factors. And I'd like to encourage everyone out there to sit down and understand third party measurement services before calling them "flaky". My bet is they are more accurate than internal analytics numbers a lot of the time.