Would you pay $1 per Digg?
December 31st, 2007
I just read about a fascinating business in Techcrunch news. There’s an outfit called Subvert & Profit who run a “black market for votes on social media sites.” Like most of these online advertising businesses, you can sign up as an advertiser or user.
The advertisers pay S & P $1 per click, S&P then take their clip then pay social media users to Digg or Stumble certain stories.
Apparently they have over 9000 “clickers” in their network. These users are encouraged to Digg random stories as well to hide the fact that they are getting paid to Digg.
From click-monkeys to Digg-monkeys, welcome to Web 2.0.
According to TechCrunch: “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.”
They go on to say: “Through Subvert and Profit, it costs about $75 to get a story on the front page of Digg, where it will receive about 25,000 clicks”
From an advertising perspective this is a pretty good deal. If I was a Product Manager for a tech or web company and was launching a new product, I’d be happy to invest a few hundred dollars just to see what would happen.
In some markets Google Adwords can be very, very expensive - tens of dollars per click. In comparison this Digg-monkey system is a great bargain if clicks and exposure are what you are after.
My only concern is the demographics of the Digg and social media audience. For tech products it would be a good fit. For non-tech markets like banking, insurance and other boring offers, would the traffic actually lead to any more sales?
I’m going to sign up as a Digg-monkey to today and see how it all works and find out what sort of companies are subverting the system.
Technorati Tags: Digg, click-monkey, digg-monkey
Categories: Black Hat SEO |
