Digg Voting Platform Lets Users Vote on Ads

07.08.2009
this week. Digg has established itself as a provider of community consensus for content. With this new system, users can vote for or against Web ad content. The more votes an ad gets, the less the advertiser will have to pay for placing that ad. Conversely, ads that are voted down will be more expensive and eventually price themselves out of the market.

Digg has been around and more or less pioneered the concept of community consensus for content. The concept certainly seems to have merit. Rather than an individual having to scour the endless amounts of information on the Web to identify what is relevant or valuable on their own, Digg helps identify valuable content more easily. Users vote on content that provides value and the more votes a given article or web site gets the higher it will rank on Digg.

As a concept, the idea of community consensus has caught on throughout the Web. Many web sites and blogs allow readers to rank or rate content so that other readers can more easily identify content that the community agrees is worth reading. Sites like and Best Buy have product ranking systems based on to enable other customers to more easily find quality products that are worth the investment.

Digg has lost some of its luster recently. Traffic and revenue had declined over the past year as the novelty of community consensus concept wore off and more sites offered similar voting services. Earlier this year they brought Federate Media Publishing co-founder Chas Edwards onboard as Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer to help turn things around.

The ability to vote for or against web ads is not new. Facebook has had a system in place for sometime to let users vote that they Like or Dislike an ad. If the ad does not resonate and the user dislikes the ad then it is not likely to be a successful marketing tool. Digg is hoping to take their core community consensus model and apply it to web advertising for a win-win that lets users view the ads they prefer and advertisers to more effectively apply their marketing dollars.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at .