InvespBlog has published what it claims is an interview with a top Digg user – someone who has a 34% success ratio in getting submitted stories to the home page of Digg. The Digg user isn’t named – he or she says “I have a reputation to withhold” (we know what they meant).
In the interview the user talks a little about how he’s able to get stories to the home page of the Digg news site and drive significant traffic back to the destination, despite the increasing popularity of the site. There isn’t much that will surprise people, the user simply does a lot of networking and reciprocal voting with other top users.
But the user also claims to charge for his services. A submission is $300-$500 based on the “quality of the article,” with no additional “promotion.” If you want your article promoted it’s a flat $700 fee. An additional $500 is charged if it gets to the home page. That’s a grand total of $1,200 for a home page story, and you don’t even get guaranteed results.
Digg knows this kind of manipulation goes on, and wages a never-ending battle to try to keep spamming to a minimum. It seems to have worked in keeping organized spamming schemes from making any real progress. But on an individual level there isn’t much Digg can do to stop top users from selling their influence.
Way back in 2007, Netscape even tried paying top Digg users directly to defect to their new service, so there is no denying that you can make money by being good at spotting a likely popular story.
One thing this tells me is that Digg should strongly consider placing clearly labeled advertisements within the news stories. Even as paid ads they’ll get a ton of traffic and Digg can charge accordingly. TechMeme, a tiny site in comparison, has done this successfully for some time. If Digg can’t stop its users from making a little money on the side, they may as well get in on the game.
I have to admit, I’m intensely curious as to who this is. I haven’t read the article yet, but I pride myself on knowing many of these “top submitters” personally, so I think it probably won’t be too hard for me to figure out who it is once I do.
just go to a bunch of profile pages and see who’s at 34%. I don’t know the names of the top users so I couldn’t check. I miss the days of the top user list.
I think,it is a start of a new career of “Pro digging”.This will be taken up seriously by many more guys after reading this article.
You miss the days of the top user list? They are all over the place Michael !
here are two sources:
http://socialbl...g/topusers.html all time list of top 100
and here is the top 50 for the last 365 days
Username
1 MrBabyMan
2 MakiMaki
3 msaleem
4 zaibatsu
5 jaybol
6 badwithcomputer
7 mklopez
8 pizzler
9 SirPopper
10 supernova17
11 skored
12 TalSiach
13 Burento
14 FameMoney
15 optimusprime01
16 suxmonkey
17 Bukowsky
18 cosmikdebris
19 maheshee11
20 hdar3415
21 insaincain02
22 MediaSight
23 diggleague
24 bamafun
25 chris1234
26 verge
27 petsheep
28 tomboy501
29 irfanmp
30 louiebaur
31 adrian67
32 vick3ii
33 emobrat
34 KevinFederline
35 noupsell
36 1KrazyKorean
37 ToeCracker
38 oboy
39 vroom101
40 wealer
41 MookiBlaylock
42 openthink
43 mark076h
44 tamar
45 Blakovitch
46 emberjohn
47 sepultura
48 mpind176
49 upick
50 arbiterofcool
Come on MrBabyMan, you’ve around for so long and you don’t know who the paid-for marketers are?
huh, didn’t know about this:
http://socialbl...g/topusers.html
Ohad, I will admit to one thing, I’m incredibly naive when it comes to the goings on of my fellow submitters. i honestly have no idea who’s on the take or not.
Maybe it’s better that way Andrew.
Maybe you’re right, Ohad. Already I’m getting the sickening feeling in my stomach that this could be someone I’ve known all along. In retrospect, I don’t think I want to know who it is.
Michael have you seen this list?
Stats of the Most Popular : Digg’s Top Sources – 365 days
Last update: 20 minutes ago
Sorted by: Diggs Comments
Domains Total Total Diggs* Total Comments*
1. youtube.com 1562 2885490 367493
2. arstechnica.com 992 939238 127900
3. gizmodo.com 731 956758 114371
4. nytimes.com 728 668620 117157
5. huffingtonpost.com 725 973295 168551
6. rawstory.com 563 679343 116576
7. news.bbc.co.uk 552 524808 95758
8. engadget.com 495 596547 83536
9. news.yahoo.com 492 504144 95610
10. flickr.com 466 1067292 87407
11. dailymail.co.uk 406 478967 84087
12. telegraph.co.uk 393 386602 65793
13. torrentfreak.com 390 500902 53090
14. cracked.com 382 654955 63897
15. cnn.com 375 419556 87108
16. reuters.com 364 326602 63272
17. blog.wired.com 318 385481 52770
18. kotaku.com 313 376744 52836
19. thinkprogress.org 311 406010 71565
20. msnbc.msn.com 303 330328 61591
21. break.com 277 500535 54862
22. washingtonpost.com 270 269097 46272
23. consumerist.com 243 371049 53338
24. guardian.co.uk 232 245976 44470
25. crooksandliars.com 217 258546 41105
26. wired.com 208 205830 27246
27. time.com 206 171760 32922
28. 5min.com 204 229050 27927
29. physorg.com 203 148366 20497
30. abcnews.go.com 196 212047 38803
31. livescience.com 194 145887 23665
32. chicagotribune.com 190 183584 33520
33. slashfilm.com 189 209648 26779
34. techcrunch.com 189 188491 21762
35. metacafe.com 188 186021 23035
Yea – At this point in time – I know who the paid top-diggers are.
I’m honored to be on the unofficial list of top diggers.
But even more proud of the fact that I haven’t taken a dime. I know who this is – I think he’s a scumbag.
Muhammed runs IM system to rig a lot of stories for FP. He has developed a good digg mafia.
The simple fact is that the long term top diggers are not on the take. They, like any quality blogger are only as successful as their integrity. If Michael was on the take here at TechCrunch and doing shady on the sly deals, it would eventually come to be known and the site would lose credibility and fail. Same goes for those top diggers. If they are on the take, they’ll eventually get found out and lose what they’ve built. I know quite a few of the top guys and none that I know of get paid… hell, this story could have been about me but I have a 36% ratio and I sure as shit don’t have $100k from those stories.
But you easily could have, and that would have netted you $100K for a couple years’ worth of building a Digg following in your spare time.
Nice article, wow i didn’t know that people got paid to submit stories. I do it for the love of submitting good content and i am in love with digg.
“If you can’t beat them, join them.”
I’ve known and observed many companies who embraced that, can I say ‘axiom’?
I’m surprised Digg still hasn’t.
(I’m posting using Google Chrome ^_^ )
**… One thing this tells me is that Digg should strongly consider placing clearly labeled advertisements within the news stories … **
very good point. This should give legit advertisers an avenue and decrease the need for *spamming. (..but it wont get rid of it) — better than nothing.
The system is nice, but it would be flawed – even if there wasn’t people like this guy. It needs something to keep it in check. I have been thinking about that and believe I have a perfect idea to take Digg to the next level. Just need to plot it out a bit more.
This has been going on for quite some time, Digg does not ban such users even though they are from a “select few” gang, on the other there is also a steady stream of top news coming from only a few top sites, which put another question mark on a system already marred by controversies.
:: grabs popcorn ::
Waiting for this piece to hit homepage in 3.2.1..
The site with the article on it has been banned by digg. It seems like an attempt to get msaleem or suxmonkey banned.
This article would hit homepage for free, even if the user is not the same who is charging $1200!
Btw the price is too high. I have seen a person asking $500 and providing good results.
hhehe
This is a good tip I am digging it…
oh hello mr. babyman
Who needs a top user. For $1200, you can buy 800 diggs at http://www.subv...rtandprofit.com
Don’t tell me you guys didn’t know that.
Digg is full of fraud. There are so many article there that make you wonder how on earth they made the front page.
Why Im giving up on Digg: http://blog.she...nsour.com/?p=71
People would like to think that digg is driven by user-content, but at the end of the day its driven by advertiser content who pay to get their stories digged to the front page.
Everyone knows that the system is filled with hacks and flaws
This is nothing new.
Many identical submissions are made with Good titles – but only the powerful will get them to the homepage …..the rest will probably just get a few diggs
Social Elves
Ethical Digg Marketing
http://www.socialelves.com/
This one is interesting as well.
That fraud, is just, well its just adorable.
amazing the dude didnt even privacy protect the domain whois has all his info
I have a ratio of 25%, anyone can do it with a little bit of effort. It’s way to easy and the system is obviously flawed. Of my last 5 submissions 4 made the frontpage.
So that’s how Reg gets all his new gadgets :p
j/p
That was a damn good shot at Zaibatsu Four 20. He is always claiming he is Digging on his Quad XEON PC with 32 GB of RAM. But kidding aside, I don’t think it is Reg either.
Use stumbleupon better
http://www.amir...mi.blogspot.com
Submission in stumbleupon is much faster
http://www.lagu...oi.blogspot.com – FREE SONGS
well said Mike… i wonder how much i would have to pay digg for their world famous digg effect if they got in on the game. WHICH THEY SHOULD.
Can someone spot me $300? I have $900 so far…
very neuromancer, very snow crash
fascinating
HI
I have made a news site which solve many of diggs problems
it is on http://crowdnews,eu and uses openid.
It still under development and can user some beta testers.
Sorry, that should be http://crowdnews.eu
Woah! You mean that it’s possible to game the Digg system?
And the Oscars are political? Oh shit, say it ain’t so!
I am training myself.
Digg is a useful, there is more information get it!
OMG,I never know this!
See ya digg. Nice knowin ya. I may come back if I find out this has been fixed.
Do some real marketing. $1,200 for a digg submission is a waste.
While I am top user on many other social networks I never found digg that interesting, anyways I sometimes wish to know how much traffic blog can get from being on front page of Digg.
Btw Maki is really good guy, talk to him on many occasions and I love his way of blogging.
Can you get more then 16.500+ visitors, I know StumbleUpon can
SU is come and go. Go check the bounce rate of those visitors. Small percentage will actually stay.
Yes 10 Times that with digg! baby easy
very interesting.
thanks for the post
nutut@web.de
Digg can bring in between 5 000 up to 125 000 visitors for a single story. StumbleUpon, given the fact you get a few dozen thumbs up and reviews, can give you approximately 3 000 up to 50 000 visitors.
Those 2 are the biggest sites… Reddit coming third, with traffic around 3 000 up to 25 000 for a homepage that would stay top10 most of the day.
Just one more reason to avoid digg and its cliche heavy voting.
Capitalism and greed at its finest, ethics and integrity at its worst. Sad how this combo is so common.
People still use digg?
the only thing digg should have done long time ago is reset all user voting block back to zero, and then algorithm would have been better able to function
Would anyone waste 12 hours a day surfing one single site? Well the good thing about Digg is that users can submit their own content so that`s a great marketing strategy for their sites. I don`t doubt there are people getting paid.
There are two sites I already know that offer ‘Digg services’.
- http://www.socialelves.com
- http://www.subv...rtandprofit.com
Regards
-
I want on the home page……
I can’t say i’m a Digg fanatic… but i’ll say this, up until now i felt sorry for these top submitters who blogged and blogged about ‘ways’ of getting to the homepage, tips and best practices.. some of which consisted of them getting up earlier than the garbage man and going to bed later than the local stripper just to be the first to report news. sad really.
but now i want to pat the guy in the back and say good job! earn that money… while you can.
mmm anti-social elements among social networking… i have used digg and submitted different stories (some really unique)… never got more than 2 digg response…
All digg has to do to get rid of those people is to offer the top 100 money for submitting their articles and as soon as they agree they are busted. Really easy actually!
Who should I make the check out to?
http://afewtips.com
I have seen the subvertandprofit site and knew this kind of things was going. What a surprise the top user didn’t want to be named?
What’s also interesting and previously unknown to me is Netscape attempting to raid the top talent Digg users.
I read an article which looked into Digg’s API data and found a couple of the top diggers would have to take an action on digg every 5 minutes 16/7/365.
That is they could have 8 hours for sleep but the other 16 hours of every day they’d have to take some action on Digg (vote, comment, etc) every 5 minutes.
Is this possible for 1 person? Or do they have an army of Virtual assistants?
Oh the joys of topical link spamming, we just published our interview our interview MrBabyMan, Zaibatsu and Msaleem;
http://www.gear...on-social-fame/
I’ve been banned on Digg over 5 times since 2005, I’m still amazed how many people have been on the site for as long as they have and havent had to reregister. I wasnt banned for spammin either, just comments (no profanity or hate) just things people didnt want to hear.
The system is very unfair, we want traffic for our hard work of posts that we submit too! Why be greedy at the top? Break pays $2000 for a frontpage video!
I recently read an article about badwithcomputer on Digg. He swore he didn’t take money. It’s amazing to see how many diggs his stories get before anyone even posts a single comment. The other day he posted a video of a skateboarder that was obviously done with special effects. I am a video & graphics professional, so I can spot a fake easily. It was 12:00 midnight, (10 on the West coast), and all my comments (including pics of the bad special effects) were being majorly dugg down. I’m talking 10 diggs down every 15 minutes. Everyone was against me for posting that this was a fake. All the comments were very similar. Some of the same jokes, and some posts were almost identical. Even ignoring ALL the posts about it being fake. Many responses were aimed at me, but not as a reply. They were completely separate posts, as if someone was telling them to go talk bad about me. It was an obvious fake video. I persisted. Some people asked why I was so upset. I told them that I was upset because everyone just believed this obvious fake video and dugg it, or there was something more going on. It got hundreds of diggs at midnight and eventually made the front page. I swore that badwithcomputer was involved. My comments about that were quickly buried by tons of negative diggs almost immediately. The break account that this video was on also had a couple other videos that were obviously special effects as well. Nobody could understand why I was upset that this video was promoted and got 17,000 hits within an hour. They told me that it’s “not like Diggs = profit.” Really!? Of course they do. That’s the business model of the internet now, is it not? I kept replying to every dumb defender of this video, and the next day the video was mysteriously removed from break.com. Sorry for the rant, but I smell a rat.
How to get on digg: write an article about digg.
Techcrunch…ever so cunning.
solution: Digg should deliberately put ads for competing companies in the stories…. That’ll teach ‘em