Digg Buries Google AdSense For Microsoft Ads

Jul 25, 2007 at 3:00pm ET by Barry Schwartz

Digg has dropped Google as its ad provider in exchange for for a three-year exclusive ad deal with Microsoft. Microsoft will be providing the display and contextual advertising on Digg’s popular social news site, with traffic estimated at over 17 million unique monthly visitors. The switch over will take place in early August and will impact only US traffic.

Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft, said:

Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content. We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg’s combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.

Microsoft will work with John Battelle’s Federated Media Publishing to bring their “unique advertising sales assets,” he also said, in Microsoft’s press release.

Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, said:

We’re now positioned to provide a world-class advertising solution building upon Digg’s philosophy of providing a great experience for users and advertisers. As the Digg audience continues to grow and diversify, we believe that this initiative with Microsoft, and the resources that it provides, will enable us to focus less on developing an advertising infrastructure and more on developing new and innovative features for the site.

Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, has post up on the news, and find the official press release here. Techmeme has discussion from across the web, and we have a thread going on our Sphinn site here: Digg’s New Ad Provider? Microsoft.

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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