ChasNote

From Digital Media Buzz:

“Digg is digging deeper for the gold. The company is testing a new type of advertisement that surfaces old content previously submitted to Digg, which is relevant to certain advertisers, and allows them to wrap it in their own ad unit.

“In the first such ad for Where The Wild Things Are, Warner Brothers picked three previously popular stories on Digg — each with several hundred ‘Diggs’ before the studio wrapped it in its ad unit.

“This new type of advertisement solves an inherent Digg weakness, that once a story is off the main homepage its likelihood of being seen again is greatly minimized. There’s huge incentive in surfacing older content — advertiser money. The ad unit also features a large graphic for the film, and a click takes you to the movie’s website.”

Beyond advertiser money — which, lets be honest, is a huge incentive to guys like me — Content Ads serve another purpose. If 280 people Digg Viceland.com’s interview with Spike Jonze, thousands of other Digg readers are bound to be interested in it too. But if those readers don’t happen to visit Digg during the few hours that story is featured on Digg’s homepage they might never see it. Content Ads give popular stories extended play, a second chance to reach interested readers who missed it the first time. The fact that an advertiser pays to put that story back on the homepage doesn’t diminish the story’s legitimate popularity.

In related news, smartphone maker HTC debuted this week with a Content Ad in Digg’s Technology section. The 300×600-pixel format enabled them to insert seven previously-popular stories instead of three.