Digg Announces Reddit-Like Ad Platform

Digg has announced it's own ad network - Digg Ads, a Reddit like ad platform that they plan to launch in a few months. The Digg Ads would appear alongside regular stories. The sponsored content would look similar to the regular Digg content except that they would be clearly marked as a sponsored listing.

The ads would be linked to various stories, video trailers, independent product reviews – many of the same types of content that one gets to see on Digg every day. Here’s an example of what the ads might look like:


The user would be able to vote for the ads much like Reddit which encourages its users to Reddit ads that appear on the site. The goal here is to give advertisers a way to present content related to their brands and get immediate input on whether it’s relevant to the Digg audience, or not. The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.

Now with even Digg launching its own ad network, wonder what Ev is planning for Twitter.

Bada Bing, Bada Boom!

Microsoft was always good in finding new names for their old piece of code. Wish only they would have spent an equal time improving it. No, not the name, the code I mean.

Take Bing for example. Yes, Microsoft Live Search is now Bing and it has already received quite a buzz. Now the first thing I tried to search in Bing (India) was "hot indian girls". And it never came up with a result. Does that mean that there are no hot girls in India. HELL NO! Ladies please don't get offended. Bing just wants to play the spoil sport and never display any results to Indians that may return explicit content. So this is what I got instead of my desired search result.


So I tried to find out how to turn off the Safe Search setting. Surprisingly, there is no such setting under Preferences! So I tried the Help pages where more surprise was waiting for me. Bing is still using Live's search page! What was the people in Microsoft thinking when they made Bing live with the Help pages from Live Search?

Anyways, from the Help pages I found out how to turn off the Safe Search setting. But for that one needs to go to the http://search.live.com page which redirects the user to the Bing home page, and we are back to square one. But since this was an issue with Bing (India) only where Bing deprived only Indians from searching porn easily, I thought about trying out some more non-perverted searches. So I search for Bing in both Google and Bing itself. Here too Bing is an epic fail. Google returned 23,100,000 results whereas Bing returned a mere 3,060,000 results. And even out of those 3,060,000 results, the CNet article for Bing was missing. So in a way Bing showed less relevant search results.

I would say that Bing was released in a hurry. So what we are seeing is a half-cooked search engine. Chances of Bing being a Google killer? Not in the near future.

Is DocCash Worth The Hype?

Launched at TechCrunch40 by Jason Nazar and Alon Shwartz, DocStoc is a site like Scribd where you can upload your documents and share them easily. Very recently DocStoc has announced a revenue sharing program called DocCash, and with that the internet and social media sites have gone ga ga over it. So I thought I might check it out as well.

With DocCash, you can make money from the documents you upload on DocStock. But you must also have an Adsense account. When you sign up for DocCash, you need to associate your Adsense account with your DocStock account. Of course, if you don't have an Adsense account then DocStock would help you create one.

Now along with your uploaded documents, DocStock would display ads using your Adsense account. And whenever a viewer would click on those ads you would earn a percentage of that revenue. The DocCash revenue sharing program would let you share the earnings in a 50/50 basis. So, the more quality documents you upload and the more you promote those contents, the more earnings you’d hopefully get from AdSense. Signing up for DocStock is free, fast and takes only a few minutes.

But my point is that why won't you upload your files to Scribd and then host it on your own website/blog and earn 100% of that Adsense revenue instead? Doesn't that makes more sense? I do understand that they have the tools to help you promote your documents on Twitter and Facebook, but at the end of the day it's you who has to promote your documents.

DocCash would be lucrative for those who don't own a blog and neither would like to go through the burden of self-host their files. So if you are one of them, or for some other reason want to give DocCash a try, you can sign up from here.