Late last year we wrote about an experimental advertising product that Digg was developing:
One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.
So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.
Compare that to the blog post from Digg a few minutes ago announcing a new advertising product:
Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.
The platform will launch as a pilot in a few months, and it will be an ongoing work in progress as we learn more from the Digg community and adjust the system. We’re still in very early stages of working with advertisers and building the system, but we wanted you to be the first to hear about our plans.
Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.
New Digg ads will appear directly in the news stream and will be clearly marked as sponsored. The more people click on the ads, the lower the price the advertiser will pay. Ads that are buried too often will be priced “out of the system.”
Facebook already lets you vote on ads
I had subscribed to Digg popular stories RSS. It gives me 100 feeds/day… WTH??? Should i visit their homepage once in a while, and avoid repeated view of link manually? Just like gizmodo, digg should give “Digg top stories only” RSS feed. This is basic requirement if digg wants to go north.
You may have been right about that, but the part about flying cars and robotic wives was a bit off.
Such a thing exists in NetVibes.com with the Digg API. It shows the top 10 posts in each Digg categories. I know Netvibes is not very famous in the US, however it is definitely one of the best RSS agregator.
This is a Trojan horse to pull one over on Digg’s users. There is no way this pricing model can be sustained, it’s that simple. So a switch to a more conventional and scaling pricing system is inevitable, along with a mea culpa. By that time Diggers will be familiar with the ubiquity and interruption of ads — and they’ll be more likely to accept the hard cold reality of a normal, capitalistic pricing scenario.
Rewarding advertisers based on how many times the ad gets dugg is a stupid idea and it will be gamed. But punishing advertisers for not gaming it and therefore charging them more is worse. So in the end Digg has a worst system for democratizing information.
so, you don’t like it?
Still not sure what took them so long. This i believe will be their killer business model as long as there’s no backlash from users.
I don’t know if it’ll make Digg anymore relevant, but this exact idea has been commented on for a while now — by standard users.
i.e. It’s nothing revolutionary and has been predicted for a long time.
As a digg user, between them doing away with shouts, not being smart enough to re-ban banned trolls when they are even TOLD of thier on-digg confessions and now advertising in the story stream
I can honestly say I can hear the water starting to spin in the bowl.
Kevin do you know what is wrong with facebook and adsense.. and most advertisements? They don’t really give a dam where the ad takes a user.. but the user does.. we remember when adsense takes us to spam site and it affects how often we click those ads. I use to use adsense, I use to click those ads..but 70% of the time the sites they take you are crap…
Same with Facebook ads.. the reason ad bright or side bite.. isn’t doing great is the ads they serve up really suck.. smap central..
I don’t blame the spammer I blame the ad interface that wasted my time… IF an ad takes me to a website that is well done… than I will continue to use it..
You say gamed well adsense is legally gained…
And youtube.. when you put shit in front of videos it is called a pop up.. seriously what idiot thought it was a good idea to annoy people…
What the world needs is a digg styled ad system..
Users can shutup.. what… you want the internet to cost money.. like that stupid other site that wants you to not show your ads…for certain users… just make the ads useful..hey I don’t have ads on my app.. pay me…
Just take me to good sites.. sites I want to see.. not the lowest common bid.. youtube.. why does it matter how good the content is.. how many millions of 10 – 100 views movies are not getting the full ad treatment… why does your advertisers care as long as you bring them business.. who gives a dam how someone finds your company.. just build them below the video part.. we might actually look as we are watching the content… let the user pick the ads.. make it total revinue sharing….partners program… sell the music companies on the idea that users can pick songs.. dance and sell them on youtube… so you can dance youtube style… you all are bloody idiots.. messing my me and my ijustine…. she is too dam hot to have an ad in the way…
I agree. Except I doubt the advertiser will be able to game it enough in comparison to every digg user on the planet who will undoubtedly just bury every ad that shows up.
What would be hilarious is if ads just get buried like stories do for no reason at all. I wonder how long Digg will keep the system active if every potential advertiser is just immediately buried…
Yep, time to earn some money. Really curious if it works.
I think this is a brilliant model. If it works correctly honest ads and good services and products would be able to advertise cheaply and annoying ads for scams would hopefully have to pay such a premium that they are ‘priced out’.
Love it!
It is only logical that they did their ads model this way. I think it will keep the interesting products in sight and boring ads in spamalot.
This model is only logical because it is addressing Digg’s specific target audience. Online democratization of product placement…who-da thunk-it. Oh yea, Digg did…again.
No, wasn’t digg who thought this one up. It’s been commented and suggested more times than I can count. Digg basically thought “okay, makes sense, we’ll do it”.
what is a big deal with this digg anyways – people can just use google
Not even remotely related.
So what happens if the community revolts against having ads in their “stream” and decide to bury every ad?
Reddit has been doing this for some time already.
Here is an idea. Give advertiser unlimited number of diggs for their own ad with each digg costing x dollars. Users will obviously bury the ad and the advertiser will have to digg more to keep it up. If it is a good ad users might spare it and the advertiser will have to spend less.
It doesn’t matter if the ads ar buried continuosly since pricing will be relative, the less buried ad will be very cheap, and the most buried ad will be very pricy.
And, I supouse we’ll found one add per page, no matter if they are all buried or dugg, one ad will allways be present in every stories’ list.
At least I would do it this way…
very smart, i wonder what the CTR is for something like this.
I think the pricing model is backwards. If an ad is dugg up to the front page it’s reach is enormous and therefore the value to the advertiser is higher, much higher. The value should drive price. Likewise, a buried ad has little or no value to the advertiser – by what logic should this command a premium? It seems that the attitude is one of punishing the advertiser.
Mind you, I think the idea of users voting ads up or down is a great idea, but I still think that the pricing should correspond to the reach, the performance of the ad. Straight CPM pricing with user-driven relevance driving exposure makes more sense to me, then you need a mechanism to allow advertisers to cap exposure so they can predict their budgets. That way users get ads they like, Digg gets lots of revenue, and advertisers who miss with an ad are punished by low-exposure, but still have an ad budget left to try and come back with something more suitable for the community.
Pretty sure it is a quality control measure. Advertisers are going to work hard to make sure their ads are top notch to pay less.
It aligns incentives to avoid bad ads that destroy user experience: Mr. Advertisers, you’ve done a good quality ad that users liked so you pay less. And vice-versa.
Anyway at the end if the ad lands on the front page, the advertiser will pay more in absolute terms. You can see it as a volume discount.
Nice model from Digg.seriously i think it’s goin to rocks!
One of the challenges here is that to some extent the “price you out” model is a bit like Google quality score. While it has its advantages its extremely hard for a lot of small advertisers to keep up with. AB testing means you have to try things and see what works. If you can get Digg QS’ed out you’ll be spending a lot of time managing things. Not always good for small advertisers who are time constrained.
Reddit already does this quite successfully, I imagine digg will be the same.
More and more Web 2.0 guys are pushing their own ad platforms/models rather than large partnership. I wonder why that is. I’m sure the larger guy’s might not be too keen on the ad model right now, but it seems a lot easier than assigning the engineering resources to build out a platform like that.
If it’s to supplement your current model, I can understand that, but if it’s a replacement, I’d love to hear/see some analytics that prove it’s worth while.
It would be interesting to see the actual data, but I’m guessing the additional targeting some companies (social networks, for instance) can provide in their proprietary systems make this worthwhile, if they can attract enough advertisers to make the market efficient.
Kudos to digg! We’ve had some great success with this exact model for quite a few months now. Advertisers will find some delightfully high clickthru rates — some of our best (admittedly for reddit merchandise) have been north of 10% (not a typo).
Alexis,
You guys were way ahead of the curve on this model of advertising. Although digg has come up with a lot of “new” features in the past few months it seems that they are just barrowing ideas from other sites.
digg bar = Stumbleupon bar
user voting model to advertising = reddit
tinyurl
using twitter for shouts
It is smart to copy what works for others, so I can’t blame them for copying ideas.
To come up with some new ideas I would go to the addicts/power users of digg. They know the site like the back of their hand and might have a few good ideas. I’m assuming they have not already done this, but seems like they would be good source for ideas. They know what works on digg and what does not work on digg.
Michael:
“told you”
I have to give you a little bit of crap for that title. People don’t like to be told “told you”. Just remember I told you that
they have already lost too much mojo to get advertisers to pay attention. add them to the deadpool!
It’s a great model in theory, and I’ll be interested in seeing how it performs. I like the fact that it takes the AdWords model but makes it more transparent to users – and gives them to ability to say when an ad is bad/irrelevant, not just when they like it. It’s a somewhat natural progression from user control of content to user control of advertising.
Michael, I think Digg should pay us some kind of royalty for this idea ;-P If you remember I was suggesting it more than 2.5 years ago on TechCrunch and you liked the idea: http://www.tech...#comment-615103
Digg, I’m waiting for my check…
Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored.
It’s a somewhat natural progression from user control of content to user control of advertising.
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It makes sense – give advertisers an incentive to create ads that people like.
At first blush, it makes less sense for digg – the more successful the ad, the less money digg makes. OTOH, since it incentivizes the advertisers to create ads that the digg users like, then users are more likely to keep using digg despite (or even because) of ads, thus making it a more attractive platform.
Biggest problem though is that it creates a huge incentive for advertisers to cheat. It actually puts a money value per digg, so we’re likely to see botnets going in – 500 diggs bring your advertising budget down by how much? Pay us half of your savings…
I like this model, Friendfeed experimented with this recently also but there ad was self promotion!
Very interesting, and have to agree with Niel Robertson…
While it has its advantages its extremely hard for a lot of small advertisers to keep up with. AB testing means you have to try things and see what works.
If you can get Digg QS’ed out you’ll be spending a lot of time managing things. Not always good for small advertisers who are time constrained.
Not going to help Joe’s Pizza Parlour on the corner of 17th/1st in http://www.OaklandNorth.net
Not, IMHO anyway.
http://outwitha...rn.co.uk/?p=299
Best, etc
Heres a concept worth considering… no ads what so ever.
It’s called adblock plus
I think it will be good that this should be expanded to all the websites.I always felt User’s will like to see ranking and rating of ads in the websites they are viewing. With so many ads in websites I believe such a service will be very useful.
User’s should be able o filter out low ranking ads using some client side script!. Maybe DIGG or any of the readers should think about this (Makings of a Startup!!)
The digg audience really doesn’t like ads and will probably bury every one, but its nice to see someone trying something new.
great idea – looking forward to seeing it in implementation.
Andy, Are you talking about my idea ? !!!
i hope digg over takes google digg rocks
I totally disagree, Digg is not nearly as useful as Google or any of its sites.
If you are a young male, 16 to 25 years old, into smoking pot, into the Democratic party, into Barack Obama, into socialism, then Digg ROCKS…to everyone else. Digg is average to useless.
Regardless if this proves successful or not, Im happy to see experimentation on the way news is basically paid for. The line between information and news is constantly blurred and Digg seems to provide both ends of that. Im happy they are at least trying to find a way to make it profitable to somebody.
An efficient means for people who provide news and information services online to get some sort of remuneration is a current business mystery. Glad to see Digg trying anything.
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Good that Digg lets the users distinguish between legitimate advertisers and illegitimate ones. They can also point out what ads are hot and which ones are not.
Hey, if its good for DIgg, then it ROCKS!
RT
http://www.onli...privacy.vze.com
Having been a Digg user for three years, sometimes frequenting the site for 40 hours per week or more I know exactly what ads will work.
Include anything that directs users to Apple, Barack Obama, marijuana, gay sex, Jon Stewart, Red Bud, Huffington Post, Green Bud, OSX, Daily Kos, bong, KosTV, rolling papers, FiredogLake, cleaning rod, the Democratic party, THC, iPhone, pro socialism, Michelle Obama, pro free health care, Malia Obama, Marxism, Sasha Obama, Comedy Central, pro Lenin, Bo Obama, anti Republican, Portuguese Water Dogs, Bush sucks, skate board, iPod, queer.
I like the idea… how many commercials get piloted first. This will create effective and profitable advertising. Go Digg.
I would bury most of the ads. Simply because ads in general have become so annoying these days.