Andy Beal’s MarketingPilgrim has a mention of Digg 3.0 new features set to go live on Monday.

"Michael Arrington has screenshots and details of the latest version of Digg, launching Monday."  There are other significant feature additions as well, mentioned in a podcast.

Digg is getting more and more like the newspaper of the web, and is challenging even the New York Times on page views (Digg surpassed rival Slashdot long ago).

Interesting!  Let’s see what Alexholic shows in comparing the two - Digg vs. NyTimes.

OK, in the last few months, DIGG pageviews do appear to be almost matching www.nytimes.com, but only since March 06 (why?).  Why March?  What is Digg doing now that makes it as viewed as the NYTIMES? If I were the Publisher of the NY TIMES I’d wonder it it made sense to buy DIGG (can DIGG be bought?). Publishers have to look at this chart and get worried or SEE OPPORTUNITIES. 

Let’s see if there’s any BUZZ on it. Blog posts monitored by blogpulse.com confirm the pattern of Digg catching up and surpassing the NY TIMES in traffic.

Looking at the blog posts shows that subject of those posts are different (in other words - in many cases, the audience itself is different) and what’s the same is Pageviews - Digg is becoming a way to provide and air news about whatever you think is important vs. what the NY TIMES things is important.

What about the Audience - can we confirm that people who read Digg are/ aren’t the same people who go to the NY Times website (and if they are the same people - are the looking to the NY Times for something else?).

URL:http://www.digg.com     Gender: Male Oriented with following Confidence: 

 :0.63 :0.37

Age: 18~24 Oriented with following distribution:

URL:http://www.nytimes.com  Gender Unknown with following probability:
:0.49 :0.51

Age: <18 Oriented with following distribution:
 

Have to admit, the NY Times thing does not sound right ……you got to be kidding me….kids under 18 years old being the main readers of the Times….nah!!!  I don’t buy it.

Let’s see if AdCenter is any better at saying who reads the NY Times.

Slightly more female except searchers over 51  years old where more males dominate, and the half of the searchers are really between 26-50 - and there’s hardly anyone searching above 65 years old.   So the real searchers according to AdCenter don’t match what the Demographic prediction tool from AdLabs says the NYTimes would appeal to.

Anyway, I did not even cover the new features of Digg 3.0 (sounds like the NY Times is going to be overtaken by Digg shortly (by this fall).    I’ll cover Digg 3.0 when it comes out on Monday but till then go to Techcrunch.