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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

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Digging Ads

June 22, 2009

On June 3 Digg.com has announced an upcoming pilot of an advertising platform, Digg Ads, which allows users to ‘digg’ an advertisement. This will move the ad up the page and lower the cost per click price paid by the advertiser. The alternative is that irrelevant ads will be buried and priced out of the system.

It’s an interesting take and could be regarded as behavioral based or socially influenced advertising. Digg should be be given credit for making a concerted effort to develop an advertising platform specific to their users and at the same time has the potential to increase the engagement opportunity for advertisers.

The success or otherwise of the program will be the willingness of Digg’s audience to interact with advertising in a similar way as they do with content. To get some perspective of whom the Digg audience are the following table reviews the Mosaic profiles indexed against the Australian Online Population for the 4 weeks ending June 13 2009.

The most over indexed group is ‘Suburban Subsistence’ which contains a strong skew in some subsets of 20-34 years olds and this borne out when reviewing age demographic results that highlight the 18-24 age groups as being the prominent audience and highest indexing age group.

Key attributes within ‘Suburban Subsistence’ include their confidence with technology and a social outlook, living in outer metropolitan and major regional suburbs, with an orientation towards coastal areas.

After ‘Suburban Subsistence’ the other Mosaic groups that over-index against the online population are the more predictable inner suburban and tech savvy “Young Ambition” and the “Metro Multiculture” groups.

It will be interesting to watch for any noticeable impacts on Digg’s audience as the program is piloted and introduced later in the year.

You can read more about the program on Digg’s Blog.

Posted by Alan Long at 06:47 PM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Advertising | Social Media