Digg has launched a new kind of ad called “Digg Content Ads,” which the company describes as widgets that contain previous Digg homepage stories that are relevant to the industry or company being advertised.
To illustrate how this works, Digg provides an example of Adobe testing the concept with banners that utilize popular government-technology stories from Digg’s archive. This is illustrated below:
“At Digg, we think ads will feel more relevant (and thus work better for brands) if they feature the kind of content we look for online,” says Digg’s Chas Edwards. “One way to do this – one that’s very native to the Digg experience – is to encourage advertisers to re-aggregate stories that have already been popular on Digg. The stories might be about a brand’s products or services, or they might be stories of general interest to that brand’s customers.”
Advertisers are not able to promote Digg content that hasn’t already been promoted to Digg’s homepage organically. This means they will not easily be able to “game” the system. If stories have passed “the age of promotion eligibility,” they may be featured in a content ad if they were never promoted, however.
“In other words, Digg Content Ads allow advertisers to re-publish existing stories into ad banners, and give those stories additional exposure within paid media; but they can’t use this approach to artificially boost a story onto Digg’s homepage,” explains Edwards.
The content ads represent another interesting way of advertising on Digg that is essentially non-intrusive to users. The model is similar to Digg Ads, which the company launched earlier this year. Those insert sponsored content (clearly marked as such), which users are able to vote up and down just like any other Digg content. They seem to have gone over fairly well with users.
Yahoo is now doing something similar with a new campaign from General Mills. The company is taking existing content from several of its properties and bringing it together to create a targeted user experience that is relevant to the ads being served with it.
