Digg’s online ad unit: Relevant content on top, ad on the bottom

Yesterday TechCrunch posted a story about a new type of online ad that Digg has rolled out.

As you can see in the picture, the ad unit contains several Digg links about the sponsor at the top, along with a graphical ad at the bottom.  In this example it’s clearly labeled as sponsored by Warner Brothers, so there’s no user deception. 

TechCrunch seems to think it’s a win-win, since it’s getting clicks on Digg content that users have already found valuable, while also getting Digg some CPM ad dollars.  I think it’s a good model that Digg (and probably a number of similar sites) can use with certain advertisers in certain situations.

But the obvious downfall of this method of advertising is that not every sponsor’s product will have content that works for the top half of the ad unit.  What if most of the press on the movie Where the Wild Things Are was negative?  Warner Brothers might have trouble finding articles in Digg that were positive.  Or even more likely, what if nobody was talking about the product in the first place?  For example, I randomly did a search for “Clorox”, a typical consumer product, on Digg.  The first article that came up was one that questioned how green Clorox’s new line of GreenWorks products is. The second was about how Clorox and dozens of other companies pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s show.  Beyond those two articles, no other Clorox article had more than one Digg.  So this type of ad unit might be best reserved for increasing buzz on a product or service that’s already getting some public attention – rather than trying to generate buzz from something that probably isn’t being talked about much in social circles (like Clorox).

Publishers have been doing these types of “editorial alongside advertising” placements for years, but Digg has done a nice job of adapting the model to its particular brand of “editorial”, if you will.