Digg Ads™ Will Give the Digg Community More Power to Influence Advertising Content
SAN FRANCISCO – Digg, the leading social news site, announced a new ad platform that applies the same voting system it uses for news to advertising. Digg Ads will look and feel like user-submitted content but will be clearly marked as sponsored and will empower Digg’s 36 million-strong community to elevate the most relevant ads by voting them up or down. Marketers will now get real-time feedback on the performance of their advertising messages, ensuring more cost-efficient and effective campaigns that resonate with Digg’s highly sought after and engaged community.
“With Digg Ads, we have two key objectives: to provide advertisers a more effective way to reach consumers, and to provide the voting community of Digg users with a more dynamic, relevant advertising experience,” said Mike Maser, Chief Strategy Officer for Digg. “We want to do for advertising what we’ve done for news.”
The Digg Ad platform will roll out to the site in several phases, beginning with the integration of ads that appear alongside organic content on the Digg website. The system is designed to elevate great ad content and filter out what isn’t resonating with the Digg community. As users “Digg,” or vote up, ad content, they’ll see the best and most relevant ads more often, while lower performing ads will be seen less until they are priced out of the system.
Over the next few months, Digg Ads will launch in beta with several partners, including Electronic Arts, Intel and others across a range of verticals. Digg will continue to evolve the platform based on input from its advertisers and community to optimize user experience and advertising performance.
In addition, Digg continues to build out its direct sales team focused on selling high-end, custom ads on the Digg site. Digg still plans to continue its current relationship with Microsoft, selling Digg’s network inventory in parallel with this new platform. Last week, Digg announced the addition of Chas Edwards as Chief Revenue Officer. Edwards joins Digg from Federated Media, which he co-founded and most recently served as Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer. Chas will focus on creating new revenue streams for the company including sponsorships, new advertising programs and channels, as well as help to manage Digg’s continued relationship with Microsoft.
“With the introduction of Digg Ads and the addition of Chas as our CRO, we take two important steps in continuing the significant growth in revenue that Digg experienced in 2008,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “We want Digg to be a hallmark social media destination for our community and advertisers alike. By drawing on our unique technology and media expertise, we can ensure that advertising is targeted and connects with our community.”
Digg company news is available on the Digg Blog at: http://blog.digg.com
About Digg
With approximately 36 million unique visitors a month, Digg is the leading destination for people to discover and share the best content from anywhere on the web. From the largest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best content as voted on by the community.
