Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

The monetization of any “Web 2.0″ website is a hot topic, regardless of how much traffic and/or buzz they have. At some point you have to make money, not just spend it. Digg, the leader in social bookmarking, announced yesterday their plans to further monetize their traffic by incorporating ads into the main Digg “river” that users can either Digg or Bury. How users react to the advertisement will determine how much the advertiser will end up paying.

Today, we’re announcing our plans to roll out a new advertising platform — Digg Ads. Digg Ads will give you more control over which advertisements are displayed on Digg. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.

You can see what Digg Ads might look like here.

From a users perspective I like the concept of Digg Ads, of course having no ads would be ideal but Digg has a right to make money. However, having the ability to control what I want and don’t want to see makes the idea of integrated ads somewhat bearable. From an advertisers perspective I absolutely hate Digg Ads. First I cant imagine many ads will actually get Dugg very often, the majority of people will choose to bury ads - especially in the beginning. On top of that, not having a clear understanding of end cost isn’t appealing at all.

The concept of Digg Ads will surely  interest some advertisers enough to run a few tests. But, since there is no shortage of  high-traffic sites that target the same demographic , don’t expect Digg Ads to stay up for very long if it doesn’t catch on.

Back in February Yahoo launched their social voting / bookmarking with only a handful of hand-picked publishers. Well finally Yahoo Buzz is now open to the public…let the spamming and widget adding begin.

Yahoo Buzz basically operates like Digg, or similar sites, where users vote for the stories that interest them. The more times a story is “Buzz’d” the higher up in the results they show. There is one key difference between Yahoo Buzz and other social sites - Yahoo allows “editorial discretion” when it comes to headlines in order to prevent serious gaming.

Here is how Yahoo describes the Yahoo Buzz process: “First, we determine the most popular topics that people are searching for on Yahoo! Then, we showcase the most popular stories within those topics, based on activities like voting and emailing stories to friends. Stories with most Buzz may be published on the Yahoo! home page - you can impact what millions will see on Yahoo!.”

So what is the big deal? Who really wants to add another social widget to their website / blog? Bottom line is that the top Yahoo Buzz stories get pushed to the Yahoo.com homepage - this link would obvioulsy generate a serious amount of traffic to the linked website. If it wasn’t for the possibility of stories hitting Yahoo.com I would be ho-hum on this.

I would obviously recommend adding a Yahoo Buzz widget to any blog / website under the category of “why not”. However, I am not sold on the traffic impact for the 99.999% of stories that don’t get to the Yahoo homepage.  Yahoo Buzz definitely deserves some monitoring in terms of  how stories get ranked and what kind of traffic it generates.

I will post a follow-up story once I have gathered enough information.