Another ‘black market’ Pay Per Digg operation has opened up which claims that its users will not get banned from Digg.
Subvert and Profit claims that it lets advertisers purchase ‘actions’ on social networks, Digg and beyond, and is now offering Diggs for $1 per Digg.
The company says that its Digg manipulation is one of the most cost effective forms of Internet advertising:
Our cost per click is about $0.003, whereas the cost per click of conventional Internet advertising (such as Google AdWords) is about $0.15. 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.
And backs its claim that its members (who get paid $.50 – $.75 per Digg to Digg stories) will not get banned from Digg:
Some of you are hesitant to participate in our program for fear of being banned from Digg. While this is a valid fear, especially since our competitors have failed to protect their users’ privacy, we’d like to tell you how we’ve minimized the risk.
Knowledge is power, and particularly, Digg’s knowledge of suspicious activity is banning power. Digg will have no such knowledge, as we’ve engineered a few tricks to ensure that our users’ activity (and access to their user page) appears normal. Let me give you some details:
- Our algorithm selects users to Digg a story based on how unrelated they are in terms of their Digging history. This is key, because one of the primary methods of detecting “gaming behavior” is seeing if the same group of users Diggs the same stories repeatedly.
- We hide the story you are paid to Digg in a short list of randomly selected stories that you will Digg as well. These stories also show up with the same relative frequency as the paid stories. This prevents Digg from making accounts on our site to see which stories are paid for, and then banning the users who vote for them.
- We never link directly to Digg.
- We verify our users’ Digg activity through a complex string of proxies.
As a marketing angle, and not to endorse this company, I like the way they try to appeal to traditional and naive Internet marketers with the ‘cost effectiveness’ lingo.
Sure, social media marketing can be incredibly cost effective, if performed the right way and tracked correctly via analytics and socially acquired links.
However, there is so much which goes into the preparation of a Digg-bait or Digg worthy project or piece that doing the same old ‘101 Ways To….” story doesn’t carry the leverage it once did.
Smart organic newsworthy content should be shared with our peers among social media and social news channels, and pinging a handful of friends and colleagues to give such material a bit of a headstart is acceptable, but is paying for Diggs worth the risk?
