And they currently have 5 engineers (believe this is their entire staff), this post is them pleading for extra funding for the fifth engineer: http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/reddit-needs-help.html
Hacker News could actually really benefit from one of those.
It's at least worth more than a staff of six.
Though, I do think Digg has been pretty much valued out of any reasonable exit by raising too much money, and the lack of vision on the part of leadership as exhibited by the tepid new version of Digg (which caters to marketers and major media to the point of absurdity for a "social" site) pretty much insures there's no way to build to something dramatically more valuable. Even if they were to learn from their mistakes, with a staff and infrastructure that big, they'll run out of money before they find their way.
In the case of reddit, it's userbase is very difficult to monetize -- they've said as much themselves. I think the less you can monetize something the more likely you'll have a lot of users; once you start doing things to monetize your userbase they get annoyed and simply move on.
I think any one of these sites is bad investment because those 300 million users can come and go in an instant. Digg could simply be over now and just takes a few people a few months to throw out the next big thing.
I don't know how they'll monetize it, but I can't help but think that whenever someone does figure out how to monetize a community of that size, it will be pretty serious cash.
As for revenue, I said that more pageviews and much faster growth from a much leaner organization was better. There were several variables in my statements.
Besides, it is not a small difference in pageviews. It's ~40%! Which pretty much certainly equates to more visits and more unique visitors than digg.
No matter how you slice it, though, digg is a 100+ person operation that is generating less value to consumers than a 6 person operation. Value to consumers is a reasonable proxy for the kind of revenue you can generate from a site. They just haven't found the formula for monetizing it yet. It doesn't mean the value isn't there.
Just a friendly reminder, you referred to pageviews as "the most important metric", thus my question.
User engagement...
While pageviews can be used as a mediocre proxy for user engagement, I don't think it proves your thesis at all. Which is more valuable, 5x the uniques, or a smaller group who loads more pages? Depend on additional variables, no?
Which pretty much certainly equates to more visits and more unique visitors than digg.
As far as I can tell (using compete pro), pageviews is the only metric where reddit wins, with digg winning handily in the others. Digg seems to have 5x the uniques, and 50% more visits. This strikes me as accurate, since reddit is focused on comments, and digg seems to focus more on links.
that is generating less value to consumers
How are you measuring that?
Are you asserting that reddit creates more value than digg, but they fail to effectively monetize and capture it? Or are you asserting that reddit's value is non-monetary, but still worth paying for?
So I'd say Revenue is the best metric to compare, but I'm skeptical Reddit will ever make much money - their users are spending all their cash on weed.