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Digg Online Advertising Gets Thumbs Up
The introduction of online advertising to social bookmarking site Digg.com could have gone horribly wrong, especially considering the elitist and often pernicious nature of the Digg community. The Diggerati could have abandoned the social media site for corrupting quality content with adverts.
It must be a relief then for creator Kevin Rose and his team that Digg has survived a potentially crippling gamble and that online advertising on the site is flourishing. “The response has been overwhelmingly positive,” chief strategy officer Mike Maser told The New York Times.
Part of the reason why DiggAds has worked is it uses the same tried and tested formula that made Digg itself popular in the first place. Users can vote for ads that they approve of which in turn makes each advertising impression cheaper depending on how many people digg it. Conversely, ads which are poor and unpopular which are buried become more expensive to keep advertising.
With 40 million unique visitors a month, the Digg community can tell advertisers exactly what they like and what they don’t. Mr Masers described Digg’s online marketing as “the world’s largest focus group.”
DiggAds have proven a very effective form of advertising too, with the average clickthrough rates reaching 1 per cent, significantly higher than the industry par of 0.1 per cent or less.
The online strategy has paid off, and Digg is now starting to grow revenue in a similar way that Facebook has found its advertising niche. The world’s most popular social network announced last month that it broke even and hopes to be cash positive by early 2010.
Social Media news posted by Scott Tickner on 15 October 2009
