By now most people have seen the new digg design and expasion of their categories beyond their traditional ‘technology’ one. But what interests me most about the redesign is their integration of AdSense ads into the design.
I noticed earlier today that they were a little different but didn’t think twice of it until Dave emailed me a few minutes ago and asked me about them – pointing out that they change color and have a darker border appear when you roll the cursor over them. They also have borders around each ad in the banner rather than one big one.
The reason Digg will have such different looking ads will be that they are a pretty big publisher and probably have ‘premium publisher’ status which means they have an individual contract with AdSense that means they have to serve a certain number of impressions and in return get certain concessions (including the ability to customize ads and a specially negotiated rate of income). Premium publisher deals are not for the average blogger as you have to have many millions of monthly impressions to get the deal (I think it was 20 million per month last time I heard – but it could have gone up).
The other thing I notice about Digg’s redesign is that they are rotating their own ads as well as some private banner ads into the banner position also. Their own ads are specifically designed to match the Google ones but are for Kevin and Alex’s podcast.
One of the perks of the job (and 20 million impressions a month) but they’re certainly an awful lot more eye-catching an appealing, even for text ads.
I also like them better than the standard formats. But that’s just because I’ve become so accustomed to seeing the same old adsense ads, change is appealing. They look good and I can see more people clicking on them as they do stand out more, people are even intrigued just by the format.
I’m pretty sure they did the whole upgrade to help attract more revenue. Those ads will definitely help.
It would be really great to have the same ‘Premium publisher’ status as the other big sites have. The ability to fully customize Adsense formats would be like the cherry on top of the cake.
The new adsense in Digg was good. In net now, I can see a growing trend among the INdians to open bookmarking websites in the form of Digg. I guess with every site trying to copy Digg’s formula Digg is only becoming more and more popular.
Went and looked. Yawnwd and got another cup of coffee. I dunno. I was hpoing to see more of … something. Look at an example like Chitika. I really think the tabbed interface, roll-over action is appealing (I’m not currently using them becuase my sites and their ad inventory match up so poorly). When I heard about the new and improved ads I really was exoecting more than just the border highlighting.
My ideal text ad would be a unit that parsed any search word that brought the user to my site and then outlined and highlighted search terms in the approriate ads. It’s technically doable.
Diggs ad placement doesn’t seem logical to me. Nothing on eaith side bar? 90% of digg readers are farther down the page and don’t have the top bar inview .. why let them escape? *smile*
Yep, 20 million pageviews per month could land you as a Premium Adsense Publisher.
If I’m not mistaken, Jeremy did mention that b5media has already surpassed that 20 Million mark a couple of months ago, so that also makes you eligible as Premium publishers as well.
OK, I found a site called http://www.duggmirror.com/ which is not affiliated with Digg, but still it has same kind of ads
Thilak: both sites have the same affiliate code, that means are the same owner.
I just managed to do some coding and got almost the same look on my site with some simple div floating and mess about with heights.
If your interested i could post the code
I was looking at the source code of digg last week and looks like their code is different than a usual Google Adsense code. All I know is that because digg is a premium publisher, they can work out with google to come up with this goodlooking ads on their site.