Can you Digg it?

"Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web."
Digg allows the community to select the most interesting things on the web and make them known. Everything from videos to news gets submitted. The most popular items get displayed on the front page of the website. Ever see an icon of a man with a shovel at the end of a blog? That's Digg. Digg is 32 on the top 50 websites list ranked by unique visitors. They were fully funded to be profitable.

The business model for Digg is simple. Just like many other web based companies, Digg makes money through selling advertisements. According to Jay Adelson, Digg's CEO, Digg gets 10-20 times the price for an ad compared to a social network. "Folks like LATimes, NYTime and WSJ come to us with those questions [the question being how to prevent the valuable newspapers from disappearing], and we work with them to drive traffic to those websites. We send them 80 million visits a month to the websites. We are helping them to understand how to leverage all these social technologies to better monetize these users." Jay Adelson said during an interview.

There is a unique difference in how Digg will use advertisements to make money. Instead of just posting ads on their site they will inject them into the stream and have the community vote on them. Advertisers will then pay according to the popularity of the ad. If an ad is popular it will cost less. The unpopular ads will cost more pricing them out of the system. At the time, Digg would focus more on non-banner ad sales, including custom sponsorships.