• Business Insider, Friday, August 7, 2009 2:04 PM

It doesn't take a genius to see that the Web is becoming increasingly consensus driven, and while Digg isn't the first company to allow its users to vote on ads, it's probably going to do it better -- and encourage far more user participation -- than any other site. Why? Simply because Digg has community voting baked into its DNA. In fact, that's all the site really is: a collection of user-submitted Web links and news stories, which users vote to either rise or fall in position.

There's also some speculation that Digg will be able to charge a higher rate per impression because advertisers will know their ads will only get a lot of them if it's an ad that users really like.

And it could use it. At the beginning of the year, BusinessWeek reported that Digg's first three quarters of 2008 saw revenues of about $6.4 million on 30 million monthly uniques for a $2 million loss, even though it has reported performed better since then.

To further bolster the company, Chas Edwards, Federated Media Publishing's co-founder, publisher and chief revenue officer, was recently poached by Digg -- which just happens to be a member of Federated's publisher network... even though it has plans to hire an in-house sales force at some point in the near future.

"It's still the early days for figuring out the models that bring brands into conversation with the Digg community," Edwards told Online Media Daily upon his appointment as Digg's new publisher and chief revenue officer in May. "Advertising doesn't perform for the advertisers if it doesn't also resonate with the audience ... It succeeds only when it enhances the product and the conversation among those audience members."

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