Digg favours Microsoft
Reader-powered news site Digg has ditched Google as its online advertising partner, choosing to align itself with Microsoft instead.
Microsoft will deliver mostly small, contextually-relevant links on Digg.com for the next three years. Over 9.5 million people visited Digg last month (June) as they read stories, voted a favourite on a list of top news reports and suggested other articles that the search engine should include, statistitcs from comScore reveal.
Microsoft signed up Facebook to its adCenter platform last summer and Digg is the first high-profile customer to join up since then. Microsoft hopes that this deal, alongside the impending purchase of online advertising company aQuantive, should help to boost adCenter’s appeal and raise its customer level against Google, the market leader in paid search advertising.
“We actually now are in the forefront of what we believe is going to be the next generation of advertising,” Steve Berkowitz, a senior vice president in Microsoft’s online services group, commented.
