Digg unveiled a new ad platform on Wednesday that will give companies an ad medium that looks and feels like user-submitted stories that have been promoted to Digg's front page. Users will be able to Digg up ads they like and "bury" ones they don't using the same voting mechanism used on regular site links.
Partners for the initial roll-out of ads include Electronic Arts and Intel, the latter of which has provided sponsorship on Digg's labs pages as well as advertising on other parts of the site.
Two things make advertised Digg stories different than naturally submitted story links. One is the lack of an upcoming section for ads. For regular stories, the upcoming section consists of user-submitted links, which are sent to a holding pen. Users then vote them up to the front page. The other is a way for users to completely remove ads that don't do well, which can't be done in this case. Instead of completely removing low-ranked ads from the front page by burying them, they're simply seen less by users.