A TechCrunch reader submits the screenshot above showing a user voted Digg advertisement for IHOP. As far as we know, this is the first time this has been seen in the wild.
The ads were first announced last month as a new type of advertising platform. The more users who digg on the ad, the less the advertiser has to pay. The more it is buried, the more the advertiser has to pay, eventually pricing it out of the system.
Here’s the interesting thing. Digg says they are internally testing Digg Ads and confirm that IHOP is one of the ads Digg employees see. But no one outside of Digg’s offices are supposed to see them yet. They give no explanation as to why this person sees the ad, but do confirm it is an accurate screenshot.
They’ve been working on this product for a long time – we first reported rumors of it in late 2008.
Anyone else see these? Send a screenshot to tips@techcrunch. Thanks, Mohamoud, for sending this.
hyundai not paying the bills?
True, no point in these kind of options when they have advertisements on the sidebar!
That’s a bizarre statement. This is an alternative form of advertising. If one pays and the other doesn’t, the poor performer will go away.
Yup, these are today’s top stories…
Do you believe anything they say?
beginning of the end for digg…
Does anyone really use Digg anyway? 90% of the articles on there are garbage. I’m not sure how it got so popular.
at one time is very good catering to tech news and tech crowd.
I hit up Digg just about every day to see if I missed that top story?
The trade association for Bacon is going to *love* this approach.
These ads are one of the stupidest ideas ever. Their core demographic is the same as Break.com, Collegehumor.com, FunnyorDie.com etc. a hundred other websites. These sites are all battling for the same advertisers, and they’re able to thrive w/out force feeding ads into the content in an intrusive way. Break.com, for instance, works with advertisers to make special content that seems to be a natural part of the site, and the users don’t feel like ads are being forced onto them.
Digg really can’t think of a more creative way to finally turn profit than to annoy users in the worst way possible? I can’t imagine these are going to be well-received by the digg crowd.
Digg’s refusal to sell a single thing besides t-shirts and hoodies is mind-boggling. Make an iphone app about a random, creative topic and put an ad for it on every page of the site. Sell it for 99 cents. It will get a shitload of downloads just because of the sheer traffic of digg. Then make another app..rinse, repeat. Sell something to users.
Well it is very interesting to see from digg what type of junk the internet sees or want to see.
Delicious, also smart. You folks won’t click the damn things so look for more ads to enter spaces normally reserved for content.
SO what is the incentive for a user to watch the ads???
Ok. I’m a fan of Kevin Rose. What he’s done personally is to be commended, but as far as Digg… this is getting ridiculous!
First the Digg bar shit, then the way they’re redirecting non Digg short url’s and now ads that are to be “Dugg?”
Digg has huge potential, but they’re squandering it by constantly trying to pull the wool over their users eyes.
Innovate and come up with some cool shit and stop trying to burn content publishers which is your main source of revenue.
Oh and clean up the mafia type experience for the rest of us. I could write the sickest article ever, have someone Digg it and yet no one would see it unless one of your “power users” approved of it. This shouldn’t be like the App Store process
btw… when I said non digg short url’s I mean people who aren’t logged into digg or who don’t have an account.
All good things must come to an end!
Yup. It’s just like that final episode of TNG. But digg isn’t moving back and forth through time.
there aren’t enough ihops
It’s all about the ads..LOL
So we’re going to see Microsoft ads that look more like fail blog posts to get dugg? Great concept, wrong site?
if it’s so easy to game digg to get on the front page, then gaming it to get cheap advertising is sure to follow.
gaming it to hurt competitors also seems pretty obvious.
I actually like this idea, but I think it’s odd that you can’t comment on the Digg Ad in the stream like you can with normal Digg stories…?
that’s a bad idea. they should be focusing on better recommendations instead of this. Digg recommended content is already low quality enough, this is just going to make it worse.
I still haven’t seen any of these ads in a while, and I see pretty much every front page item as I pay attention to these things.
I wonder how much more internal testing needs to be done before everyone starts seeing these things; after all, that’s the point right?
Since most people hate ads, and Digg users are already proficient at burying content they don’t find politically acceptable, what’s to stop Digg bots from auto burying all ads as soon as they appear?
DIGG = DEAD
Can’t you really just dig a companies web site and then the higher it get the more advertising that site gets?
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