April 3, 2007
Crowd Sourcing and Black Hat Advertising
The latest black hat marketing trend in the web 2.0 sphere is gaming the system and manipulating the votes so un-suspecting users will believe that 500 people really do find your crappy site or article is cool. Most savvy webmasters will agree that Digg is easy to cheat and now a few companies are trying to make a business model out of it. The latest venture is Subvert and Profit as mentioned today on TechCrunch that pays users .50 to Digg a story and advertisers looking fake a story up the ranks will pay an even dollar. Another site teetering on the wall of ethics is PayPerPost which ultimately will damage the credibility of blogging in general to make you second guess whether that rave about the latest and greatest product is in fact genuine or a paid placement. So, what are your thoughts? Will paying users to post and Digg ruin the core of the ‘share this’ and social movement?
April 4th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I dont mind sponsored posts but at least I do it right. My friend puts her link into things to rank up her technorati and got down into 30,000’s When I do it on my blog and I got to 80,000 on my own I felt great. I think they take the best part of it.. the knowing your hard work paid off.
April 4th, 2007 at 10:35 am
I guess sponsored posts could be OK, as long as there is disclosure at the top that it is in fact a paid post.
April 6th, 2007 at 10:31 am
I think it takes away from read votes and is silly.