Four months after going live

Feb 26, 2010 15:55 GMT  ·  By

Advertising has been the main driving engine of the entire online economy, so you'd think that, after all these years, there's no way someone could really come up with something new. Bug Digg showed that approaches that might seem counter-intuitive might very well pay off in the long run. Last year, the social news aggregator introduced Digg Ads, a new ad format that would slot in among the regular story. Against all odds, Digg Ads proved quite successful.

The general wisdom is that this is a bad idea and that ads should be separate from content if you don't want to drive people away. What's more, Digg's core users were known to be very vocal about the things they didn't like in the past. However, Digg needed the revenue but it wanted to come up with a way that would appease the users as much as the advertisers.

Turns out that it got things right and the ad format was actually preferred by the users. Digg Ads also performed better than regular ads. The secret was the fact that, just like with regular stories, users could vote on the ads either digging or burying them. This was a risky move and users could very well bury any ad they saw, but, unsurprisingly perhaps, it seems that people don't really have a problem with ads, they just have a problem with the bad ones.

"So far, the feedback we’ve gotten from users has been mostly positive. We have heard from users that they would like to be able to comment on ads, which is on our product roadmap for this year. We have also heard that sometimes users bury ads but then still see them again later - this is often because advertisers test out many variations of the same ad," Bob Buch, VP of business development at Digg, wrote.

"In the first four months, DiggAds has been extraordinarily successful for Digg. From a revenue perspective, things have been great – we view this as a positive sign that giving users control over the advertising they see is a good user experience. Advertisers have given us great feedback, and we have seen some big brands make repeat purchases after seeing initial success," he added.

Digg says it has some polishing up to do, but, for the most part, things are working out well. It may be a little too early to tell, but if the ads prove good in the long run, others may very well start implementing similar formats. And with Twitter about to introduce some "innovative" ads on the site, it should be interesting to see if it borrowed something from Digg.