Digg Gives Videos Prime Placement With New Digg Video Site

Digg, a service devoted to helping users find and share the most interesting content around the web, has now more formally expanded into video, the company announced today. With the launch of Digg Video, Digg will break out the most popular video content found online, giving it its own high-level section on Digg.com. On the new site, you can browse trending videos, share videos to Facebook or Twitter, and, of course, Digg them.

The Digg Video page, like most of Digg.com, is fairly minimal. The hottest video at the moment is given a prominent position by itself. (“I have smoked crack cocaine” is there now, for example). That could really drive major views for the video that lands in that spot if all goes well. As you scroll down the page, other featured videos appear from a variety of categories.

Although Digg Video at launch doesn’t offer any top-level navigation to filter videos by type, each video has a small tag indicating its category (e.g. politics, music, movies, animals, etc.). When clicked, this takes you to that tag’s page on Digg.com where you can find other videos to watch and non-video stories to read.

In announcing the new service, the company explains that, since relaunching Digg two years ago, the “Video” tag has seen more traffic than any other tag on the Digg.com site, necessitating a move to better support the medium. The site’s launch is also being sponsored by Squarespace, the Digg blog post notes. Like Sponsored posts on Digg.com’s homepage, Squarespace gets a top spot for its sponsorship, with a native video ad called “How To Make A Beautiful Website Without Knowing Sh*t.” The placement is not the highest on the site, but just underneath, and clearly labeled as an ad.

Digg Video will make its way to the Digg mobile applications soon, the company also says, and will share news about the site on both Twitter and Tumblr. In the meantime, you can check out the new Digg Video domain itself, at digg.com/video. The Video link has also been added between “Home,” and “Reader” (Digg’s Google Reader replacement) on the company homepage.