I was perusing the HTML source code of Netscape.com when I noticed that they have the Quantcast script. This means the numbers you see here are about as accurate as you can get without looking at actual server logs.
So what does Quantcast have to say? Apparently the Netscape.com domain received almost 12 million uniques in June. If you remove the sub-domains that don’t make up the social news site (about 9%), you get over 10 million uniques. Note that Quantcast’s numbers are also likely to be low since they rely on the javascript to be enabled on the visitor’s browser.
I’ve been a Netscape Scout for a year now and this even surprised me. I’ve seen some pretty steady growth in the usage of the site. For example, when I started, half the stories on the front page had less than 10 votes. Nowadays it is not uncommon to see the top 5 stories with 100+ votes each. Over 300,000 users have registered. Over 500,000 stories have been submitted. And over 1,100,000 comments have been made. (All of those numbers are available on the Netscape tracker)
That all being said, I think it’s safe to say this amount of traffic is higher than anyone would have expected. So it begs the question: why don’t they tout this? This, combined with their Google PageRank of 9, should make Netscape extremely attractive to content producers.
UPDATE: Krista from Quantcast confirms in the comments that they measure Netscape’s traffic directly.