Recently reported on Wired Blog, Digg.com has turned over its advertising needs to Microsoft away from Google. The announcement comes as a bit of a surprise to me personally.
Hey everyone – I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.
This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.
Looks like Microsoft is starting to go after some major players for advertising to boost their AdCenter sales. This is probably the best move for them since their search engine sucks isn’t nearly as popular, so they need to start creating some serious sources of revenue for their advertising network.
I really don’t see them being able compete, even while buying out advertising inventories like this, with competitors such as Google and Yahoo! Both of these networks, YPN and AdSense, have a much larger visibility because their engines are better. AdCenter is still so young and it needs a lot more time to develop before it becomes a true competitor with the others in the industry.
I guess we can look at this as another attempt of Microsoft to get a foot in the industry. Time will tell whether or not Microsoft just needs to stick their foot in their mouth and stay out of the industry or not.
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