In a move that is sure to raise a lot of eyebrows around Diggnation, social news network giant Digg has just announced that they are going to be ditching Google and moving to Microsoft to serve ads on the site. Digg co-founder Kevin Rose on the Digg blog:

Hey everyone – I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.

Kevin compares the deal last year that Facebook signed with Microsoft. A refresher from last August:

Facebook and Microsoft Corp. today announced a strategic alliance in which the two companies will collaborate to bring relevant advertising to the more than 9 million registered users of Facebook, the Internet’s leading social directory. Microsoft’s advanced advertising technology and Facebook’s unique social network make possible the multiyear collaboration grounded in the two companies’ commitment to technological innovation.

This follows Digg’s decision to add a Microsoft category to the site back in February. I was always wondering why there was no Google one added as well considering the amount of Google stories on the site…

Any way you look at this – its a big score for Microsoft and a blow to Google, maybe not in terms of huge ad dollars but in terms of a high profile defection.

Should be fun to follow the comments here on Digg

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