Is traffic the same as value?

No, and the gap is usually large enough to change a valuation by an order of magnitude.

Traffic answers "how many". Value questions are about composition: are these visitors attached to a decision, do they come back, does the traffic survive a pause in publishing, and does it arrive from more than one source. A property with 80,000 monthly visitors and none of those four is worth less than a property with 900 that has all four.

More on this in traffic quality versus traffic volume.