Why Digg’s New Ad System is Gaining Popularity
Posted on March 3, 2010 - 4 Comments
Digg has always been an extremely innovative company. Launching into the social news bit in 2004, the site has grown immensely popular with monthly pageviews in the tens of millions. Digg’s popularity has allowed for a counter-culture of internet users to become Diggers, voting on the best stories to hit the front page and sent traffic spikes to interesting and useful blogs.
Recently Digg has launched a new ad system that is surely turning heads. The ads are inline with both stories and page articles, and look strikingly similar to a regular story. Users can even digg or bury these ads, allowing poor quality advertising to sink while bringing up the more interesting ads. But how well has Digg’s new service been running, and is it making the company money?
I’ve seen a lot of great ideas in my day, especially run on websites and popular communities. Digg’s new blended ads are perfect for fitting right into the layout of the site, and also not intruding on the users browsing the site. These also work very nicely for advertisers, and can even send spikes close to how much front page stories would be sending.
In a company blog post, it is mentioned that Digg’s ads are served through auction-style voting. Bidders can auction how much they wish to pay for so many clicks, and a CPC value is created for advertising. This is much different than how StumbleUpon runs their ad service, charging $0.05 per visitor.
Overall this seems like an excellent idea. Digg has really hit the nail on the head here, and I can only see large profits coming in for the company through these new ad services.
As for traffic and turn-around, I haven’t had the chance to try out the new rig. I am hoping to invest some advertising money soon into Digg’s ad system so I can give a full review of the backend and how well everything runs. For now, I will leave the thoughts up to you.
Any ideas on where you think Digg may be going? I personally am in favor of seeing Digg’s ads like this, I’d prefer them over large flash banners or moving graphics… those are far too distracting and actually annoying at times! Digg may have gotten a great system running to funnel money into the company for upkeep, but we’ll have to really wait and see how their new services will pay off.
Post Author
Interesting. I’d be curious as to whether the ads – that look like user-generated links – annoy or are embraced by Diggers.
Jennifer´s last blog ..Ski Lessons in Park City, Utah