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.
