My internet insight of the week - It's not all traffic that counts

Unique visitors (traffic) is a metric often used to determine the success of a site, but as we can see from the valuation of 2 similarly sized businesses, it is not all traffic that counts.

Digg.com and linkedin.com are roughly the same size.
But digg is valued less than $100m while linkedin is valued around $1 billion (source: businessweek)

so what makes the $900 million difference?
- linkedin relies on more than just online advertising (subscription services)
- linkedin knows alot about their users and can show more targetted, relevant and hence more expensive adds