Digg is planning to introduce a new form of advertising in a few months, where ads appear within the social news aggregator’s river of content. Like stories themselves, these ads can be “dugg” (voted up) or “buried” (voted down). The company has cleverly priced these ads so that the more people digg an ad, the cheaper it is; the more the buries, the more expensive. So companies have the incentive to offer ads that users will like.
Social sites, including large social networks like Facebook, have also been experimenting with ads that appear within streams of activity, that can be voted up or down. Digg’s usage is interesting because it is one of the larger news aggregators, with 36 million users a month. Unlike social networks, where ads are paired with a wide variety of activities — photos, groups, events, forums, etc. — Digg users are very focused on voting and commenting on the items in their feeds. And they care about particular topics, like gadgets, video games and political news; notably, two launch partner advertisers are game-maker EA and chip-maker Intel. These ads will also be paired with more traditional advertising from the same brands, like what you can see in the screenshot.
