Digg Applying The User Voting Model To Advertising

The Washington Post reports ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/03/AR2009060303504.html ) that online news site Digg is set to implement a new method of web advertising, where ads are voted on socially just like any other news story posted to Digg. Good ads, or those that are "Dugg" often, will receive better placement relative to their cost-per-click, while bad ads (ads that are "buried" often by users) will often, according to Digg, be priced out of the marketplace. This system should allow Digg to maintain relevant advertising that interests its users while pricing things very efficiently.

This is a really interesting idea since it seems like it will not only benefit digg and the advertisers but also the users. Digg will definitely benefit by being able to make more revenue from the dug advertisements that will receive better placement. And the Advertisers will obviously have more value per click for these adds since they now know that they are found to be relevant and appealing to the users they are advertising too. But also this for once will allow the users to receive advertising that they might actually care about as opposed to places like face book who just give you advertising based off information they get off your page guessing what your want to see as opposed to knowing what you find relevant. I wonder if information cascades can form from this and create a rich get richer advertising system on digg.

I suppose this is a similar but more of an open model of Facebook's thumbs up/ thumbs down advertisements.

This seems a great idea especially for a company like Facebook that has still struggled to make revenue ever since it started. They are having a hard time balancing ads that people would want to see and would want to click. Ads cannot be too obtrusive because users will complain or too small as for users not to click on them at all.

Adding a feedback system allows the company to know which advertisers to have closer ties = better bid prices = more revenue in the end. From this same strategy, we can probably also see advertisers to compete an attractive advertising method that would earn them many clicks, thus increasing traffic, and perhaps make many sales from its increased traffic.