Controversy surrounds social media rigger Subvert and Profit. The service, which helps advertisers get on the front page of Digg, has been a thorn in the side of the service and the bane of many of Digg’s users. Subvert and Profit, like User/Submitter and Spike the Vote, pays users for digging stories in the hope that they’ll make the front page. For the service, they charge advertisers $1 per Digg. Feeling they have Digg under control Subvert and Profit has taken dead aim at eBay’s most recent acquisition, StumbleUpon.
Although, at one point Digg was able to ban about 100 users from S&P, the main hurdle for these services has not been Digg itself, but its users. Founder Ragnar Danneskjold says their biggest problem has been with users burying their stories. In the past, Digg users have gone to great lengths for the company. When Spike the Vote went up for sale on eBay, a Digg fan bought the service for around $1,200 and handed the domain over to the company. Digg and Michael Arrington talk it over on TalkCrunch.
S&P was able to bounce back from their banning and now claims to get 2 out of every 3 stories submitted to the front page, having processed over 120 stories total. They’re even considering a front page “money back guarantee” at the $200 level where they will craft the titles and descriptions themselves in order to increase the chances of getting the 60-100 Diggs needed to get on the front page.
They chose StumbleUpon over competitors like Reddit for a few key reasons they outline on their blog. StumbleUpon makes a good target because it provides continuous traffic, has 2.6 million users, and is one of the fastest growing social media services out there. It’s also a lot easier to game because there is less transparency behind who voted “thumbs up”.
Like on Digg, S&P plans on charging $1 per positive vote. According to their numbers this is expected to be a pay per click rate of about $0.004, comparable to an advertiser paying them $80 for Digg and getting 20,000 hits. However, there’s also the constant debate over the quality of traffic from the two services. According to the company, only one or two votes would be needed on StumbleUpon to get 500 or so visitors. But I wonder if advertisers will just vote up sites themselves if they only need so few votes.
Only one or two votes would be needed on StumbleUpon to get 500 or so visitors? Is that correct?
It really depends. Sometimes I log into Google Analytics and find a random burst of 200-800 visitors from StumbleUpon, and it appears to be just from a couple of votes.
In total, I’ve received over 16,000 visitors from SU, and if I can see on the stumbleupon page for my site that I’ve only got 28 votes. So 500 seems right to me.
If someone gets something boring on the Digg frontpage by paying diggers, I wonder if this item will last on the frontpage too for any serious lenght of time — or if it’s dugg down quickly (bringing little advertising value to the person who paid for the “ad”).
I think the real reason why they’re not gaming reddit is because they can’t.
Considering reddit is the only social news site of status that has a unique front page algorithm: links actually need to be sustained with upvotes over time to remain on the front page.
This makes it much harder to game since they don’t start out at #1 once leaving the “new page”.
But maybe they just want to try something new with StumbleUpon. Either way, I hope they keep up the great work!!!
I was under the impression that SU had an algorithm that counted against votes that were not ’stumbled’. If a user goes to a url and thumbs up the site that is not equivalent to the site randomly being shown and then gets thumbed up. I may very well be wrong but I also thought that if the stumble was from their paid internal advertising then that vote would also be discounted.
Anyone have any insight to Stumbles algorithm?
I doubt 2-3 votes gets 500 visitors, I have never seen that on CN.
i find that there is a new industry around theses services and i put payperpost in the same basket. smg (social media gamers) seems a good name for me.
new business
I think so good to have DIGG
search item before BUY!
GO TO
http://www.reviewitem.com
I don’t totally agree with what S&P are doing, I think they have a maximum of 2-3 stories a day being put up on the front page, although this service does allow me to make small pocket change, enough to buy a new domain name every week. And I was one of the users that were banned, S&P got be back on track and making cash within a few hours.
This company seems to be making good profit.
I imagine these sort of services will become the norm. I see them as holding a much lower moral ground than PayPerPost, etc.
If there is a means of traffic, people will exploit it.
There are other ways to get people to dig your story:
Be interesting.
Write well
Be original.
Even a boring news story can be interesting if written well.
I the only one that loves the founder’s name? Ragnar Danneskjold is an Atlas Shrugged character.
“hope they keep up the great work” –
– what a lame comment /
– This is just as bad as PayPer Post – i wish it were written about in the same light