Digg has just announced that it’s going to begin rolling out Digg Ads, the site’s innovative and experimental advertising product that invites users to vote on which ads they like best, over the next week. Digg first announced the new advertising product in June, and they were briefly spotted in the wild in July, though Digg claimed at the time that the ads were limited to an internal test. Digg plans to roll the product out gradually over the next few days to a small subset of users, with plans for a larger deployment over several months.
Here’s how it works: the more upvotes an ad gets, the less advertisers have to pay, giving them an incentive to produce content that will appeal to the Digg userbase. At this point it’s too early to tell how the ads will fare (there’s a chance Digg users will just launch a bury brigade whenever they see one), but if the screenshot below is any indication they stand a fair chance at being a hit — I’m sure plenty of Digg users would jump at the chance to get a cheap Three Keyboard Cat Moon shirt, and there are plenty of other memes that sites like Threadless could capitalize on. Likewise, I’d imagine electronics companies could see good traffic by promoting discounted video games and equipment.
reverse adwords engineering?
Kind of a side point, but I never “got” keyboard cat.
don’t worry, you’re normal
they need more traffic, it’s going backwards
Thanks for the news, as opposed to this which is not news: http://www.tech...s-bad-for-digg/
Just saw one sponsored by threadless
Screenshot?
Advertising? Now they’ll start raking it in…
bad idea. i can already envisage hundreds of meaningless cats, farts and quizzes all over digg’s homepage. having a crowd choose the news for you is one thing. having them choose the advertising you get brings it down to the lowest common denominator
I get why they are doing it but they shouldn’t.
Just like Facebook, letting people vote on ads seems cool, but all you are doing is reminding them:
1) There are ads
2) We understand you’re not going to like them so we let you vote.
3) It suggests the ones you do like we are going to advertise to you more.
I don’t see any winning scenario? I don’t think Digg are really realising what they have that others don’t with regard to advertising. They know what’s hot before anyone else….. simply exposing that data to advertising networks would be more of a win than this imho.
DIGG is dead to me. I get all breaking news and relevant stories pumped out ferociously by my tweeps. For a while now I stopped going to digg.com because it’s just a destination, and that’s it’s problem! where as I get the same content and top news (if not better) tweeted to me in real-time minus the middle man.
Kevin, You should have sold when you had the chance! I’m sorry to see this ship sink..
I’m not sorry to see it sink.
Kevin & friends ran the site like brain-dead hippies, and the average user is mildly retarded at best.
Furthermore, as much as I like the concept of the site it’s impossible to get exposure for legitimate submissions because one of the uberdiggers like MrBabyman will just resubmit it under their own account instead of digging yours.
IOW, eat **** and die, Digg.
I really wish advertising on the internet became local. I would be willing to look at ads if a restaurant advertised a special for the weekend or a local band was having a concert. I know most small companies can’t afford it, but 99% of ads have never appealed to me.
I like what you’re saying but I don’t know how that could work.
If you mean local to the writer of the site, that’s easy. They can just use keywords and something like adsense will pick them up, but if it’s local to the reader, the ad script needs to be able to discover the location of the reader and then filter relevant ads to them. I don’t think google’s scripts can do that. nor am i aware of any others that can.
Wrong. You can definitely already segment down to the zipcode+mile radius level in Google Adwords.
It’s pretty easy to Geolocate somebody based on their IP address.
This is a bad idea and seems to show the scrambling that Digg is doing to survive. It seems apparent that they took a break after their initial success while everyone else was working.
I like KR, been following him since TechTV, but if Digg pulls off one more hit, it’s time to sell, K.
Congrats for making your ‘experiment’ into a best seller, but I really think your getting passed up at this point. Such is the web – time for your next innovation. Don’t re-arrange chairs on Digg.
Does anyone know if this ss this a self serve platform like facebook has? Or do you have to go through one of their sales reps?
Digg is a dead website. Add it to deadpool. His hipster founder Rose preferred hipsterdom to work.
DIGG = DEAD!
Just saw these. I’m not sure how this will go, but there are no comment threads on the ads. That seems like a mistake since Digg depends on the community. I want to see what people are saying about an ad, not just the digg/bury functions.
Nevermind: “…commenting is a feature we’re working on for a future iteration. “
I’ll be shocked if they allow unmoderated comments on ads.
Advertisers typically don’t want their trademark linked (figuratively and literally href’d) to racist-trolls and their ilk that will surely flood the threads.
they should somehow separate the ads from the content. i think people will still look at top voted ads out of interest but mixing is a risk…
It’d be like superbowl ads, only considerably more of them.
if the web-preneurs can make some good, original ads, i’d definitely look at them
Totally agree, I was SHOCKED by the degree to which they integrated ads with news. Fooling people into confusing ads with content is what third-rate MFA sites do.
Always hated Digg. Glad to see that incompetent user administration can translate into stupid business decisions that will hurt the company.
I love your Wordpress theme, is it a custom theme?
Looking forward to using it my self! It worth a test!