Social news giant Digg has announced their plan to roll out a new advertising platform, called Digg Ads, which will hopefully help them bring in more ad revenues. It will allow Digg community to control which ads are displayed on the website by either voting up or baring them. Thus the most popular ads will gravitate to the top, and those that are not well received, will be filtered out.
The voting model for Digg ads will also be beneficial to advertisers: the more positive votes an ad receives, the less the sponsor will have to pay. On the other hand, too many buries will drive the cost up for advertisers and will eventually push the ad out of the Digg network.
Digg is planning to mix up the content with the ads, so the ads will appear in between news stories and pictures. The ads will look exactly like a normal submission but will be clearly marked as sponsored. The two major Digg competitors, Reddit and StumbleUpon, have already used ad systems that are integrated into the content.
Digg has never really found a way to effectively monetize the site, losing money year after year. The new interactive approach seems exactly in the spirit of the social voting community and promises to be a success.