Digg Overtakes Facebook with 1400% Growth, 22.6 Million Uniques

Very misleading quote. The full article features disbelief about Compete.com numbers, so it seems as much a critique of Compete.com as it does a story about Digg.

Since I ended up reading the article, I have to wonder if Compete counted Digg buttons on blogs as visits. Facebook, of course, did not even get a Share/Like button until 2.5 years later in late 2009 (http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/facebook-share-buttons/) It would be easy to get millions of daily uniques if popular newspapers all request your script or image in every article, and sites like Compete don't properly take social buttons into account.

(It's interesting that recent articles have debated if Facebook itself now counts the display or click of a Like button as a visit.)

It's a fun exercise, but we all know how reliable Compete is for quantitative traffic comparisons. For example, Compete currently claims Reddit (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/reddit.com/) has less traffic than Digg (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/).

I sincerely doubt Digg surpassed Facebook's traffic at any point in the company's lifetime.

Is anyone else hoping to read the same article in 5 years but about Facebook?

It's a crazy world out there, kids:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1850428

Try not to let it bother you too much.

This re-emphasizes one of my own personal rules of entrepreneurship: when someone offers you a FU money exit, and you don't already have FU money, you take it. You take it and walk. Because if you don't, you might regret it, and who knows what the future will bring. After you reach FU money, it's not like you can't go and try building another new product/service/website/gadget again -- you can, except you'll be starting from a much safer and happier place, with more resources, connections, eyeballs, etc.

Sic transit gloria lacinia felis.

Wasn't it the redesign that started the avalanche of people leaving?

Or am I mistaken? Maybe if they had just left it alone and did gradual tweaks instead...

More recent data shows nosedive:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/digg.com/

In the blink of an eye, in internet years.

What a total BS blog post with no real data

Really? In which parallel universe?

As I see it the basic problem was one of name. Who wants to be a digger? It sounds fancy pants to be a redditor.

Fascinating to see Digg coming back from the grave, so to speak. I didn't see this coming.

Er... Fascinating to see such an old article come up on Hackernews without the age of the article in parenthesis.

That's a derp.

Go ahead. Rub it in.