There’s no shortage of Digg style social voting sites currently available, but to date the general move in user generated content sites towards compensating users for participation has not come to general users of social voting sites. Propeller (previously Netscape) offered money to top Digg users to participate on it site in July 2006. However, new service Ximmy aims to take compensation for participation to the general public.
Here’s how it works: Users earn points based on the activities they undertake that can be redeemed for cash. For submitting a story or leaving a comment on a submitted item, users earn one point. If a story they submit hits the front of Ximmy they earn 15 points. Users accumulate points until they hit a balance that can be cashed out. 1000 points can be cashed out for $10, 1800/ $20, 3200/ $40, 6000/ $80, 12,000/ $160 or 20,000/ $300. The money is paid via Paypal.
Ximmy itself isn’t brilliant, for example it isn’t pretty to look at and I’m betting it’s a very standard Pligg install, but it’s the payment program that makes it interesting, at least in an overall market perspective. Will Ximmy steal away top Digg and Reddit users looking for pocket money? probably not, but expect Ximmy to be the first of what is likely many new social voting sites to come that offer compensation for user contributions, and ultimately that’s a good thing.
There’s also the counter argument that users of social voting sites contribute and participate for the enjoyment and social aspects services such as Digg provide, and even the off chance of getting 15 seconds of fame. That will always be the case for some users, but as the noise continues to increase and online users are forced to chose between one site or another as their capacity to interact across many sites hits its natural peak, I’d bet that sites such as Ximmy (although perhaps not Ximmy itself) will win the hearts and minds of a decent portion of the market, after all, if we’re going to spend time building value for these sorts of sites, it’s not much to ask in return that we should be compensated for our time, even in a small way.
Seems a bit stingy.. gotta pay more! The more the better!! (it’s their model)
“Will Ximmy steal away top Digg and Reddit users looking for pocket money?”
- I want to laugh
.
Technicle
agree, but at least it’s a start, it’s a lot more than other sites pay.
shams
You left out the words after that “probably not”….perhaps I was being a little soft in saying that though.
I doubt it, + I’m sure there is some clause that says that “You only get paid, if the site makes us a billion dollars the first year”
DR.. well… 10x is more like what’s right.. even for little pocket money
or at least the top 100 users get 10x of the “standard price list” 
Why 3200 gets $0
If I owned Ximmy, now that the site has been featured on techcrunch, I would sell the site for as much as possible and just let it go. No way it can make enough money to pay its users like it plans to.
Deadpool in the making. Didn’t we learn from Calacanis already?
tons of spams, they may have 20000 users but 10 real human keep creating the accounts.
I’ll never understand why crappy out-of-the-box Pligg sites with NO USERS (other than the 18 year old kid that created it) get featured on TechCrunch.
2 votes for stories on the front page? Seriously TC, don’t you have standards?
is this a pligg site?
Michael
likely
Jeff the Great
revenue model alone. New site, of course it’s going to have two votes
We are winning. Saving time and efforts…
View -> Page Source.. the first few lines identifying itself as “Pligg Content Management System”..
@Duncan
So if I announce a “revenue model” for my highly customized, locally popular pligg site, you’ll feature it?
We’ve seen this pay-for model fail miserably and repeatedly.
Can anybody name a time in the past, say, 10 years when this “revenue model” has worked? By this I don’t mean companies who have become successful once they dropped the idea. Seriously, this has always been a non-starter.
Actually, there is a site that’s been around for a year or so that already pays top users around $300-$500 a month (portion of ad revenue) for posting news voting on news and linking to news items.
Digital Journal http://www.digitaljournal.com
http://digitaljournal.com
I have been a member for almost a year and get paid monthly. There’s a good sized community of posters, a nice interface (Ximmy is disgusting and absolutely a Pligg install).
web 1.0 - pay to use something
web 2.0 - free to use something
web 3.0 - get paid to use something
web 4.0 - ?
And with a possible 70’s-style stagflation situation staring us down (yes…I actually heard this evil, scary word in Bloomberg’s podcast yesterday), sites that share with their users will gain an enormous advantage.
If you’re unemployed and online all day…like almost 8% of everyone in Michigan right now…you might as well get something for it.
Paul
You know, Mahalo is actually working…
Yes, It is a pligg Site.
Duncan: Please tell him to remove the install folder, and remove install.php before somebody else decides to reinstall the site and start a fresh.
damon: perhaps there will be no web 4.0, if there is no solution in that algorithm
I like the web 3.0 ananlogy. Look PeerIt.com has been looking to make money off this model since last summer. And they actually offer a store front that sells goods and pays out for recommendations.
Its a tough market to crack and its going to take more than a few cents to crack Diggs hold.
For the curious: http://www.peerit.com
Vic: they just removed the install folder, damn, i was about to refresh their site
I was thinking of doing something similar to my niche pligg site: http://www.iFili.com
I am not sure if a pay-per-post model will work and it might ruin the overall quality of the news feeds.
Did this site seriously get coverage? Seriously?
Cory: im thinkin the same thing, I mean I can create a site like this in a couple hours, this is nothing new, y does TechCrunch cover this over other sites that are at least a little more innovative.
they are not close to being first with this, and certainly not best.
http://www.bestcashcow.com has been doing this for awhile but with a better model. they share adspace so you can put up your own google, yahoo, custom ad. the site concentrates on financial services so clicks pay a lot.
you can post links or publish original content on the site.
GK once told me: Do something so good that people would pay to use, not something so pointless you need to pay people to use it.
RBA:
That’s true, sorta of like paying people to go watch your movie to create a crowd effect, might work for one day, but not long term.
Sorry, I don’t understand why it’s “ultimately a good thing” to pay users for submitting and rating stories. Isn’t the whole point of social voting genuine contributions to the community, not mindless activity motivated by self interest? So yes, I think it is too much to ask to get paid for our participation, when it’s almost guaranteed to mean what we’re contributing to will be worse than if it had grown in a genuine, organic fashion.
I think this entire UGC will peter out. People don’t want sites they have to pay to use. They want sites to ‘ pay them” They use the services of a site that IS free and next thing you know, they’re making demands of the site owners.This has all the makings of a huge house of cards about to crumble.
The dutch social news website http://www.ekudos.nl places user Adsense beneath the description. In this way the contributors are automaticly earning a little cash when someone clicks on the Ad..
A paying system like Ximmy is another option, but i don’t know i it will work in the long run.
I think it would be a great idea if they offered more value than just payment for the same type of concept
The design and outlook suck!
People are going to start abusing it just to make more money.
I really like the idea that there are actually some social sites that pay the people who do all the work building the site and creating value. I think this model will eventually falter because of spammers. If someone could build a better model of this, it could create a major shift in social networking. I have been advocating for this type of platform for a while and it is good to see it finally begin to materialize.
Ximmy sounds like an innovative idea. Pligg offers an adsense revenue sharing module, but this offers a more straight-up compensation model, which some individuals will appreciate.
What’s wrong with the design? It might not be as well thought out as Digg’s, but I think it still beats Reddit anytime.
MS: the design sucks
This is a Pligg implementation as can be seen from
in the home page.
I am looking for the source link that they should have based on the affero GPL that Pligg uses
* d) If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program’s complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.
LoL,
Really Nice Pligg site and free Pligg script..too
sweettsss
http://www.pligg.com/demo01/
New search Engine & StartPage.
http://www.WireSeek.com
Can’t see tis working, especially if the PyCurl pligg hack is used by spammers to bypass the pligg registration process.
http://socialcmsbuzz.com/hacke.....-13122007/
The design looks pretty bad also with no real quality.
Let’s stop calling these sites “Digg clones”. Digg sucks, and is inferior to Mixx, yet people still erroneously refer to Mixx as a “Digg Clone”.
A clone is identical by definition. Digg is on its way down the toilet. It is no longer the ‘gold standard’ of social medial. It’s time the blogosphere got with the times.