Yahoo! Buzz Surpasses Digg

Acccording to comScore unique visitors on Yahoo! Buzz surpassed Digg in April for the first time. Buzz got nearly 7 million U.S. unique visitors which is 74% growth over March.

Buzz, is a social news service by Yahoo! that is similar to Digg. These site can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites.

The following graph shows that, for the first time, Buzz's traffic surpassing Digg's in unique visitors per month.

What's more, about 51% of Yahoo! Buzz users are women, compared to just 39% women for digg.

DIGG Says Sale Rumors Are Not True

DIGG's Jay Adelson has strongly implied that they are _not_ about to be sold and called the rumors of a Google and Microsoft bidding war completely unfounded.

Also, we hear from Digg Co-founder Owen Byrne that the rumors appear to be false though he noted at his blog that he would not necessarily be in the loop with a sale decision.

Owen even suggested that the rumor of the sale brings into question the credibility of TechCrunch, though I'm guessing TechCrunch had a "good" lead on this story but not necessarily an accurate one. Supporting the rumor may be the fact that Google and Microsoft have not denied they are in talks to buy DIGG. Given that deals of this size will influence stock pricing one would expect them to quash a false rumor.

Perhaps there are simply a large number of nuanced discussions going on between big players most of the time, and clearly there is always a price at which DIGG or others will sell. Thus most of the rumors about "discussions" are not really true or false, though they are often misleading.

Digg.com - Sale May Be Soon

Although Digg has been rumored to be for sale for some time, this time it appears likely to happen. Most reports suggest Google as the most likely Digg buyer with the possibility that Microsoft will also get in on the bidding. Both Google and Microsoft have extremely strong cash positions though they also presumably have many aquisition targets in mind.

Best bet? Digg will be sold to Google for about $200,000,000.

Congratulations will be in order for Kevin Rose and the Digg major holders and investors, but I’d like to know from the key Diggers if they’ll feel any loyalty to the new owners or to the project. Also, do they think they are owed more than … zero… on this deal?

Social sites do offer their participants something of value = participation and platform - but are there “losers” in these equations?

How do the high level participants who have put in thousands of hours and made the site what it is feel about the huge cash outs by founders and investors?

Many, including billionaire Sir Richard Branson of Virgin, have suggested that the distribution of equity during the *liquidity* events does not properly reflect the building of equity. Entrepreneurial capitalism correctly asssumes you need to highly reward risk to get folks to take business risks and innovate, but to get optimal production and innovation I would suggest we need to pay “deeper” on these big internet deals.

In the case of a YouTube, DIGG, or Facebook I’d find a way to reward those down the food chain in some proportion to their contribution to the enterprise, partly for the simple reason that even a modest reward would brand the mega deals as “fairer” than simply a situation where fat cats effectively exploit self-motivated worker bees who have generated the user content and social networking that the market values so highly.

But don't listen to me - let's hear what the big diggers say after the Digg deal closes, and more importantly if they just keep on digging or ask for at least a small piece of the action.