A bold new initiative from Digg is set to reward marketers for creating popular ads, and penalize those whose work isn't up to the standards of the Digg community.
Dubbed Digg Ads, the new advertising system applies the basic premise of Digg -- voting shared news stories up or down the rankings -- to the website's advertisements. But Digg Ads is slightly more than that: the more an ad gets dugg, the less the advertiser will pay on a cost-per-click basis, according to the company blog. On the flipside, less popular ads will mean higher charges for marketers. Digg Ads will launch in a pilot later this year.
According to Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, users are already Digg-ing advertisements on their own, but Digg Ads will give marketers a fairly clear barometer of how effective their ads are.
In an interview with Ad Age, Rose said his staff will consult with advertisers to help them understand the type of content the community responds to, but he hopes that "over time advertisers will start to catch on and figure out on their own what's going to work."
