Scott Karp takes a closer look at the Digg v. NYT traffic discussion meme, and notes that “[i]f you extrapolate Digg’s daily page views to about 270 million monthly page views, it is definitely within striking distance of the Times. It’s also possible that Digg could rival The Times in terms of unique visitors in the not too distant future — it’s already half way there based on daily uniques.” He then observes:
To me, the interesting question is how Digg will rival The New York Times as a source of the most important news of the day. The Digg community has a reputation for some indiosyncratic choices, but certainly on technology, Digg has a breadth of “coverage†that already exceeds that of the Times.
Fair enough. But to my mind the interesting advertising question is whether in this case one unique is the same as another; to my mind the answer is definitely no – it seems to me that for a lot of reasons, the Times’ traffic is a profoundly more valuable property than Digg’s. One quick Q comes up – Mike Arrington mentions “given the tremendous growth and passionate users, something tells me they are going to have a rather large liquidity event.” Perhaps, and a coup for them when (surely not “if”) it happens. But these passionate users, do they spend money … on anything?