Dial 9999 to Vote: New Digg at Ad Rates

Sounds almost like American Idol … the new experimental advertising system that some people are Digging. Although I cannot claim to have been watching American Idol, I heard this last season that an abuse of popularity voting may have skewed the outcome of that popularity contest.

Personally, I think voting on ads is great; in the right context. In fact, I used to love to watch the ads on the now defunct firebrand.com site. People could vote on ads there, too. However, do you think that voting on an ads popularity should be the criteria for how much the advertiser pays for that ad? On the surface, it sounds like it might be great … if you think the same way as a specific group of like-minded people. I see a lot of room for abuse by large corporations and organizations that have the ability to pump up the vote and blow out the little guy who is trying to get started and does not have a base of followers to cosign his or her ads.

Content and relativity are fair and equitable ways to help gauge ad pricing, more so than popularity. If an ad gets thousands of votes, then most likely they are going to generate a lot more revenue. Should they pay less or pay more? In time there is the potential that everyone gets hurt, because the online markets would be dominated only by large groups that have huge fan bases; potentially curbing new ideas, products and innovations. If the small fry that is trying to compete with the mega-popular ads is charged a higher rate for his or her ads, then the likelihood is that they will look for other more effective ways to advertise; abandoning social networks and online marketing and potentially closing their doors. I believe a serious caveat of the vote pricing model is that it has the potential of driving away competition … and without competition you have huge monolithic organizations that control what you have access to and minimizing your choices.

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