Perhaps I’m very late in noticing this(?) but Digg seems to be using AdSense rather than Microsoft ads these days. Since Microsoft paid a lot of money for an advertising deal with Digg I wonder how much Google had to pay to have their ads displayed instead?
The targeting seems pretty good, as you would expect from Google.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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I doubt Google had to pay much to be perfectly honest. The fact is that Microsoft and Yahoo simply dont have the volume of advertisers to really support a paid search product. Especially in a social networking environment where 95% of the queries are plain bizarre and unmonetisable. I discovered this myself when i tried to increase internal search revenues on some of my own sites – basically there was simply not enough advertiser rotation on the system to get people clicking – i may aswell have just run with banner adverts instead for the sense of ad blindness i got after a few searches. Ended up ditching it the new installations and reverting to google very promptly.
Google has so many different advertisers that they can throw up different and new results every single time on even the weirdest search phrases – so they are more likely to get clicked – meaning the traffic volume on digg can naturally make more cash. Must’ve been a painful decision for Microsoft to make. But hey it’s about time they gave on the search data battle and continued pursuing universal logins and social graph data IMHO. But they at likely to lose that battle too if they dont start offering more APIs
Ususally sites do it the other way. They start with Adsense because this is convenient then as their traffic grow they move to other programs (affiliate, direct sales…). Digg using Adsense really shows their failure at monetizing the site.
Nah, its not surprising why they would do that. Its pretty natural for big sites like Digg to monetize it since they need to upgrade and purchase for a better space and bandwidth speed
I’ve always thought that as a site develops it moves from having Adsense in the early days to more direct advertising deals later as it find more success – perhaps this jsut show that certainly in the current climate those deals aren’t out there and that Google’s advertising options are the better option?
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