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.

Warner Brothers launched a variety of ad units on Digg today to promote opening weekend for “Where the Wild Things Are,” including Content Ads that pull existing, popular Digg stories into IAB ad units.

From TechCrunch:

“Last week, we wrote about Digg testing a new kind of ad that allowed sponsors to find previously submitted Digg content and and wrap it in their own ad unit. The first such ad just went live for everyone this morning. And it seems like a really great idea.

“Since I wasn’t able to see the ads before, I wondered if the actual Digg content portion of the ad would link back to the sponsor or to the actual story. Not only does it link back to the story’s permalink page, but it routes it through a DoubleClick referral. So yes, Digg is getting paid for each of these clicks, while users are being sent to content that quite likely do actually want to go to. Win-win.”

One clarification: IAB ad units on Digg, including Content Ads, are sold on cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) basis, so we don’t make more money if readers click on these banners, though we sure do like it when they do. (Digg Ads, the ad units that allow marketers promote their own content on Digg’s homepage — rather than content that’s already been submitted to Digg and has been voted to the homepage, like the stories featured in Content Ads — are priced on cost-per-click (CPC) basis.)

Here’s how the Globe and Mail described Content Ads (with color commentary from yours truly):

“In 2007, almost one-third of those surfing the Web clicked on an ad. Now the figure sits at just 16 per cent, and the vast majority of those clicks are driven by an even smaller group. Less than one in 10 users are ‘natural born clickers’ who account for most traffic to banner ads — the people most likely to click on ads are already inclined to do so.

“‘The more we can make advertising feel like a valuable experience … the better it’s going to work for advertisers, the more money we’re going to make, the happier the Digg community will be,’ said Chas Edwards, Digg’s chief revenue officer. The site’s strength is that its content is vetted by real people, he said. Each headline listed there has a yellow box beside it showing how many users ‘Digg’ the link. Users can also ‘bury’ inappropriate or uninteresting links.

“‘Those yellow boxes, and the blue headlines that point to content, you can think of that as the native language of Digg, the vernacular.’”