Digg-numbers

TechCrunch posts today on failed efforts by Digg to sell the company for at least $150M. Another day, another hundred million dollars. What caught my eye was the reference to one of the reasons why:

One point of controversy was around Digg’s claim of 20 million unique monthly visitors and steep monthly growth, whereas the Comscore’s most recent September report shows only 1.3 million monthly unique visitors and flat growth since April (see chart below). Comscore is notoriously flaky, and these numbers are for U.S. households only. Comscore is almost certainly significantly under-reporting Digg traffic.

Interestingly, this echoes the smackdown between Rocketboom and Zefrank earlier this week over the accuracy of Rocketboom’s reported traffic numbers. I have no idea whether Rocketboom’s reporting is accurate or not, but it’s clear that the difficulty in calculating traffic is causing some real teeth-grinding, and perhaps a little axe-grinding as well.

One last point – this is about the Nth time that Mike Arrington has had THE scoop on tech M&A news; he’s now consistently out-scooping the MSM when it comes to good old-fashioned business reporting, at least on the topic of Web 2.0.