DIGG has dumped GOOGLE for advertising services, and signed a three-year deal with Microsoft. The deal will utilize Microsoft adCenter to deliver contextually relevant text ads. Digg.com is one of the top social-news sites, drawing almost 10 million visitors in June.
FOX and MYSPACE will team up to produce The Storyteller Challenge, an online user-generated video contest. Aspiring producers will upload a 5-minute pilot to MySpace starting September 4th. MySpace users will be able to vote on their favorite videos, and two winners will be chosen. The prize: $25,000 and a development deal with Fox.
ADPINION is a new startup looking to shakeup Internet advertising. The company allows users to vote on the ads they wish to see. A small “thumbs-up” or “thumbs-down” will appear on all Adpinion ads, allowing users to let their preference be known. Voting histories will be compared to find ads that might appeal to a particular user. Ad rates will also be effected by user voting: if a particular ad is less relevant to a user, it will cost more.
COMSCORE is further tweaking its metrics, this time to accommodate for the total amount of time users spend on the web. Heavy Internet users have been skewing the numbers, driving up the average amount of time spent on the Internet. To combat this, metrics will be grouped into three segments: heavy, medium, and light users. The breakdown is intended to help advertisers reach more moderate users, and avoid displaying the same ads repeatedly to a small group of heavy users.
JOOST revealed that it had accumulated over one million users. The feat is impressive, considering the software is still in beta. The full service is expected to launch later this year.