Digg Ditches Google In Favor Of...., MICROSOFT Options

[skore]

Today Digg announced that they had signed a multi-year deal with Microsoft to serve ads on their site. Their previous ad serving partner was Google. This is the second big social network that Microsoft has signed up (Facebook last August) and a big PR blow to Google. Some more background here.

For those of you that are familiar with Digg - you'll know that for many linux & Mac loving diggers, the only thing hated more then Microsoft is the RIAA (barely).

Did Digg sell out its users by 'dealing with the devil' or did they make a smart business move going for the green (you know that's what this was about at its heart)? Is this a sign of AdCenter's emergence or just another low converting deal that isn't really worth much more then good buzz?

[Adrian]

I expect a lot of Digg fans will find some way to rationalise it. It's how they are, they're a big crowd of sheep in a way. If someone like Kevin Rose says "Microsoft's cool, we're going to use them for our ads", I reckon a decent sized portion of the Digg crowd would go with it.

I'm sure there will be a few "WTF's" as well, and a few gripes, but I wouldn't expect it to be a big deal like that whole DVD number thing was.

A lot of them may even chuckle as they probably have Firefox setup with adblocker....

[markov]

There are rumours that Digg has got a secret agreement with MSN. So at last they are not with Google. It might be a big blow to GOOGLE.