Both Digg and Facebook passed the 20 million visitor mark, which measurement firm Compete considers a magical milestone for Web 2.0 sites.
Digg, Facebook Hit Magical Mark
Compete’s Jay Meattle noted on the company blog how he first wrote about YouTube when it passed 20 million visitors. Four days later, Google announced it would acquire YouTube in a $1.65 billion deal.
Meattle thinks Digg and Facebook are prime acquisition targets, especially with the volume of visitors they now draw. Digg’s growth to their current level of visits has been particularly dramatic, rising some 1,400 percent from May ’06 to May ’07.
Facebook has been on the rise recently, a trend likely due to the opening of the community to anyone who wants to join. Also, Facebook fully unveiled its application development platform in May. That drew considerable interest from developers and the people using new applications built on it.
The price for either Digg or Facebook, should they want to be acquired, could be an 11-figure deal. Facebook reportedly considers itself worth around $8 billion, while News Corp’s flirtation with Yahoo for a stake in the company in exchange for MySpace values that social network at $12 billion.
Those who could pull off a deal of that magnitude may not necessarily want to do so. Even for a Microsoft or Google, eight- to twelve-billion dollar buys seem pretty steep. It depends on whether a potential acquirer thinks the community would be worth the valuation over a period of time.
