It almost feels patriotic to watch once-tiny web startups move up the corporate chain. Digg announced today that they’ve signed a deal with Microsoft as their new ad provider — replacing John Battelle’s FederatedMedia as their previous one. Read founder Kevin Rose’s early blog post here.
The deal is very similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft some time ago. As the site continues to grow grow grow, the deal will provide Digg with a larger scale ad platform technologically and let them focus on a deeper user interface — one which Rose states includes the incentive of ‘no more dancing monkeys.’
It’s a very exciting time for web startups, and with the amount of interest that is being put into leveraging the millions of eyeballs and interest these startups have accumulated in the past couple of years, there’s no telling as to where it will go. Advertising prices for Digg, last I checked, were around $15 – $20CPM through Federated.
If Rose’s last line in the blog post is of any indication, we should look forward to something new and big coming from Digg sometime very soon. Until then, keep Digging. 
