Subvert And Profit is a service that lets users pay to get their sites on Digg (and more recently StumbleUpon).

Unlike Pay Per Post, the company doesn’t waste a lot of time trying to spin their business into something socially acceptable. People pay them to pollute big social sites and get traffic, and they’re ok with being slammed for that. As long as they make money. The whole operation is complete with founder pseudonyms (Ragnar Danneskjold, Vasili Taleniekov), proxied whois records, and a clandestine PayPal Account.

The service is bringing in the new year with a new pricing model. In ‘08, Diggs and Stumbles will be increased to $2 per vote. Users will be paid $1 for their votes. You can also earn 20% of the earnings of any friends you refer, and 10% of the cost of advertisements from any advertisers you refer.

And they are also expanding into YouTube.

“Crowd Hacking”

Getting articles on the front page of Digg has gotten harder as the community has grown, however. Digg’s algorithms have become more resistant to the same groups of users voting stories, so getting even 50 Diggs is no guarantee of success. Although, S&P claims 9,000 users internationally which they can spread the votes amongst. They also ask users to vote for a random group of other stories to obfuscate their operation. S&P previously claimed a 2/3 success rate.

Assuming it takes 100 votes to ensure a story hits the front page and that it will pull in 10,000 visitors, you’d be paying $0.02 per visitor; a rate comparable to low end remnant advertising. Articles could be much more effective, or not hit at all.

Next Stop, YouTube

While they have not yet revealed how they plan on subverting and profiting from YouTube, we can take some guesses based on Dan Ackerman’s infamous guest post on the subject. Dan’s viral suggestions included email lists, comments, views, blog embeds, and ratings. I imagine S&P’s strategy will center around paying their users to boost each of these.

However, getting big on YouTube is significantly harder than Digg or StumbleUpon. Front page featured videos are chosen by YouTube itself and pushing a video up the ranks in terms of views requires tens of thousands, not hundreds of user actions. I can only imagine their plans include outright view fraud to make the video “go viral”.

Still, I’m left wondering how much all this trouble is worth to advertisers. YouTube videos don’t easily drive traffic to a website, making them harder to audit than referral links from Digg or StumbleUpon. Also, at the end of the day you don’t know how much these services actually contributed to the success of your content. Any statements about the success of these operations come from their founders and are shrouded in promises of secrecy for their clients.

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.

Subvert and Profit is the newest service to try to sell home page placement on Digg. Like User/Submitter and Spike the Vote before it (both now offline), the idea is to charge people for a digg vote (in this case, $1 per vote).

Digg users can sign up and will receive $.50 every time they digg a story (note: this is in clear violation of the Digg terms and conditions and many users who have joined similar gaming sites have been banned from the Digg).

The difference with Subvert and Profit is their positioning. People who want to get stories on the Digg home page are called “advertisers.” The site describes itself as “We allow advertisers to purchase actions on social networks” and says that they are “50 to 100 times more cost effective than conventional Internet advertising.”

The service also has an affiliate program of sorts. For every user you refer to the site, they will pay you 10% of that user’s earnings going forward.

No one has been able to set up a successful service to game digg so far. Users who signed up for User/Submitter were banned. SpiketheVote, which described itself as “bulletproof” was sold on ebay for $1,275 and the buyer then donated the domain name to Digg.

We’ll see how this one does.