Digg lets members fine advertisers

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 4 Jun 2009 at 11:32

Social-news website Digg has launched a novel new advertising service that allows the site's visitors to vote for their favourite ads - and financially punish those that they don't want to see.

Digg's entire modus operandi is based on the wisdom of the crowd. Members are invited to submit links to stories they find of interest, and the submissions that earn the most votes (or Diggs) from fellow users are promoted to the site's homepage.

The company is now taking a similar approach to advertising. Sponsored stories will now start appearing on the Digg homepage, and users are being invited to Digg or 'bury' them.

However, Digg is practically inviting members to punish poor adverts by imposing a financial penalty on adverts that are unpopular.

"The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay," says Mike Maser, the site's chief strategy officer. "Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system."

The idea has received a mixed reaction from Digg members. "So the bury brigade will come in and bury all the ads to infinity, so the ad people will have to pay a lot and eventually stop paying for ads here? How is this a good thing for Digg?" asks one of the members, on a Digg story announcing the new scheme.

"To all the people thinking about just burying all the ads: if Digg doesn't profit at some point it'll die," replies another user. "This is is a pretty sleek ad solution that gives us users some control over the ads that are shown."