Forget the news, now you can Digg the adverts too
By Dave Parrack
Digg is a social media site that allows its users to vote news stories, as well as photos and videos, up or down depending on their quality. To Digg something is to vote it up and make it very popular. Now, Digg is extending its voting system to include adverts, essentially democratizing the advertising on the site.
Digg is still the largest social voting site on the Web, despite a number of nice alternatives such as Mixx and Reddit. Digg is also the one out of these which has the capacity to send a lot of traffic to a site in a very short space of time, sometimes enough to knock out a server or two.
The reason I like Digg is its ability and ambition to innovate. Some ideas, such as the DiggBar prove to be unpopular, but others improve the usability and function of the site, and some, such as Digg Dialogg, give the power back to the masses.
Digg’s latest innovation is a new ad platform that turns the adverts themselves into the subject of the voting on the site. This doesn’t apply to all adverts on Digg.com but rather ones commissioned by individual companies. Electronic Arts and Intel are acting as the guinea pigs for the initial roll-out but I’m sure others will follow suit quickly.
The adverts will appear on Digg and look almost but not quite the same as the news stories which are the bread and butter of the site. Registered users can then vote these ads up and down depending on whether they like them or not. Hulu already does something similar.
There isn’t a chance to bury the ads completely but depending on their popularity or otherwise, two things will occur. The adverts voted down will appear less often than the ads voted up, and more interestingly, the charges levied for the ads to appear will also increase the more unpopular they prove. So, produce a terrible advert which Digg users hate and be priced out of the game.
The whole thing is an intriguing prospect which I’ll watch with interest as it’s rolled out over the next few months. As an experiment into user involvement with advertising, it could produce interesting results that may be useful to more than just Digg and its advertisers.
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