Digg now shows Chitika ads can they stoop any lower

by Patrick Altoft on July 14, 2008

Digg has always shown some really really awful adverts. They used to use Microsoft for advertising and the relevance was so poor that nobody would ever click on the adverts.

Today I’m looking at Digg and see an advert for a hotel in Las Vegas and a Chitika ad unit promoting a £6.99 sock for an iPod.

I don’t understand why Digg is showing me adverts in dollars for US hotels? Why can’t they attract any premium advertisers? Surely they should be showing a big iPhone banner from O2 or Carphone Warehouse this week?

Digg knows what stuff I like because I give it a list of maybe 30 sites every day. Why are they unable to translate our diggs into advertising dollars?

Note that there isn’t anything wrong with Chitika, just that Digg should be showing ads for smartphones, expensive cars and other premium products. Nobody is going to suddenly buy an iPhone sock from that advert today.

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Published in: Social Media

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Chris Angus 14/07/2008 at 12:50 pm: Nice post Patrick, I’ve thought for a while now that Digg and other Social Networks are hollow as a business model and are massively over-inflated in terms of value.

Digg is valued at billions of dollars, but I’d like to see the true advertising ROI. The CTR sucks big time and the traffic converts ten times worse than traffic referred by the search engines.

Are we heading towards the social media bubble bursting when advertisers realise just how much money they have wasted?
2 Matthew 15/07/2008 at 11:07 am: I think due to the massive amount of users that they would get some clicking through to purchase things… but it must be a seriously low conversion rate. I think what you suggested would be best where they track what you are in to and then display ads that are relevant. That shouldn’t even be too hard to implement.
3 tony dee 19/07/2008 at 10:11 pm: Digg, should maybe invest in their own network. Without the backend of non-relevant garbage pinned within the contextual search.
4 diabetes 21/07/2008 at 7:10 am: nice post about digg…thanks bos
5 Will 03/08/2008 at 7:18 am: If digg got a little spamier and started offering exclusive deals on Apple products (since digg users love anything Mac related) they would see tons of conversions. Better be more aggressive then they are, or they may never be bought.

They need to do things that encourage more narcissism than already exists on the site and have it revolve around the users spending money. Spend 5 bucks a year to have special features on your account…features that make you feel superior to the other members.