Posted by: Leslie Norgren, Project Manager
What if the price of an online advertisement was based on if people liked the ad or not?
Well in June Digg began plans to implement a process to do just that with a new form of contextual advertising. The new advertising platform called Digg Ads allows users to either Digg or bury sponsored ads. Sponsored listings began appearing in August and are still in limited rotation as the platform becomes adopted by both users and by the site itself.
Ads are designed to look and feel similar to regular Digg content, falling in the stream of stories, but are noticeably marked as paid assets.
The more people who Digg an ad the cheaper the ad becomes, and on the flip side, the more the ad is buried the more expensive the ad unit becomes.
Digg states that the “goal for Digg Ads is to create a better experience by giving you [the user] more control over advertising content that appears on Digg.” But the question becomes, what will Digg do if the user chooses to control the feature so far as to always bury ads that appear within the river of content?
It will be interesting to see how the users of a social voting site adopt the changes of ads appearing within normal content, as well as how advertisers adapt to an ever-changing pricing structure where their effort may have little effect on the dollars that are spent.
