Digg announced on their blog that they are implementing a new ad platform with a fascinating premise:
Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.
Digg Ads will appear alongside stories in the river. The sponsored content will look and feel similar to regular Digg content, but will be clearly marked as sponsored. It may link to stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content you see on Digg every day. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not.
This isn’t an entirely new model (Facebook and Reddit have similar concepts), but it’s an interesting one. This is essentially the AdWords model with two twists: transparency and the ability to express a negative opinion of the ad. The average Google user barely understands the difference between sponsored and natural links, let alone the concept of quality score. Therefore, they don’t realize that by clicking on an ad they are effectively “voting” for that advertiser by increasing their clickthrough rate and quality score. Digg is taking this concept and making it completely transparent – and in the same format as the rest of their content, so user relearning will be minimal. Additionally, if users find an ad to be annoying or irrelevant they can “bury” it, which will cause the advertiser to pay more and rank lower on the page. It’s so simple it’s almost brilliant. How many times have you wanted to squash an annoying ad?
The key to this model is user empowerment. It’s the exact opposite of push advertising where consumers accept the fact that they are going to be forced to watch ads in order to view their desired content, regardless of whether they care about the ad or not. Now not only are users being targeted with ads that are more likely to appeal to them, they have the ability to control how much the advertiser pays, and how prominent the ad placement is. It seems that a natural progression from giving users control over their content would be also granting them control over their advertising.
It also puts even more pressure on advertisers to be creative and relevant in their advertising. If users hold the reigns, you need to keep them satisfied – and providing a disruptive experience will not accomplish that. Advertising will need to be increasingly tailored to the website it’s placed on in order to ensure its users will find it relevant and informative.
There will certainly be some kinks to work out. An effective “voter fraud” program will be more crucial than ever, for one thing, since number of votes will determine the media cost of advertisers. But, I think it’s an innovative concept in advertising and I’ll be very interested in how well it performs.
In my book, one thing is for sure: if Google ever adapts a system like this, the “Belly Fat” ads are going to be the first to go.
