Digg Developing "Democratic PPC" Ad System

[Steve Iser]

Digg’s Sorry Revenue Stream, And Rumors Of An Experimental Ad Product

Digg has some serious revenue issues - $5million a year and it's CPM ain't doin' so well - especially if you hear kevin rose or jay adelson talk about it in the news or DiggNation with Alex Albrecht/Rose.

I love how the social sites are moving towards new PPC models that aren't like AdWords.

MySpace with behavioral targeting..
YouTube with video promotion...
Digg with "Democratic PPC".

There is a very interesting trend moving in the ad business this past year.

- Steve

[Steve Iser]

Of course this will be extremly challenging for the average marketer trying to advertise - because I don't think many people understand the Digg community - its ironic because they HATE advertisements.

So you would really need a winning offer to win the Digg crowd over.

[Jay Deiboldt]

I think the people on Digg (like your Canadian self) want nothing to do with ads.

So what's up?

It's up to people like you to crack the code.

What does the Digg crowd wanna buy?

[dvduval]

Like anything else on Digg I'm sure the "democracy" will also help improve their system. They really do need to work on advertising. They could make more for sure.

[JimLillig]

What does the Digg crowd wanna buy?

They don't want to buy anything. They want to share. This is where social media sites need to discover that traditional models such as banners and PPC will not do well on these types of sites. The democratic model seems an attempt to allow the "sharing" to be extended, BUT it is still a site primarily for letting other know what is cool to them.

Using bookmarking sites for direct sales probably won't generate a whole lot of interest from the user base. But if the site had the ability to leave information through cookies on who Dugg what on a users computer, and then cross referencing that with their other behavior might become a better behavioral re-targeting measure than just on sites visited and could be used by ad networks to increase their relevancy. But that probably steps way over the privacy line.

[Steve Iser]

I could easily be wrong, but I don't think Digg will ever find a way to properly monetize it's base - it's a community of an old school jaded internet crowd who use services like AdBlock in Firefox to prevent ads from being seen.

Traditionally-speaking, it's a tech site - so yes Jim obviously I agree a direct sales approach doesn't work because it's not a very commercial platform to begin with.

But given the state of how Digg works, if Digg users endorsed a PPC ad Jim, and it's backed by social proof from people constantly "digging" it could sell a product quite well through that channel - tech-related gadgets anyway.

And yes I've seen that proven before - where a popular Digg article results in a lot of people actually taking their wallets out to buy something.

The Digg crowd does have money - it's just that it takes a real winning offer to make it work.

Your CPA-style campaigns and Clickbank products will be an absolute epic fail on Digg though - that's for sure.