The US Marines And The Mormons Are Buying Votes On Digg?
from the say-what-now? dept
The LA Times has a short story on one of a bunch of companies that claims to be able to let you buy votes on Digg (as well as some other sites, but Digg is apparently the main attraction). There have been a bunch of such companies over the years, but what caught my eye was the claim in the article that among the customers of this particular company were the US Marines, the Mormon Church and the Korean Dept. of Tourism. Perhaps I don't follow the Digg spamming world that closely, but I'd mainly assumed that it was focused on random publications or no-name companies incorrectly believing that getting onto the front page of Digg would boost the company into the big time. But the US Marines and the Mormon Church? That seems really odd. Oh, and as for the claims that if you get on the front page of Digg it can send tens of thousands of visitors to your site in a matter of hours... don't buy into the hype. Over the past few years we've been on Digg's front page a bunch of times and it certainly drives a nice stream of traffic, but never more than a few thousand visitors (sometimes significantly less). It's always nice when one of our stories makes it, but I can't see how the amount of traffic Digg drives could possibly be worth the rates this company supposedly charges.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: buying votes, gaming, mormon church, spam, us marines
Companies: digg
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That's Heresy
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I would so digg this
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While we are throwing about random accusations...
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Mormons!?!?
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Maybe it's not about hits...
What they want instead is good PR: even if no one follows the link, Digg's audience sees a headline that portrays the Marines in a positive light.
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Suggestion for DIGG
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which is why i never go there anymore
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Re: Maybe it's not about hits...
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it really isn't that hard to do, and a number of people have done it and continue to do it. it is manipulation of public opinion at it's finest, sort of like the people making Avril Levigne the most viewed video on youtube by using refreshes and multiple loads on a page. Buzz can be faked, and hey, it's "FREE!".
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Re: Suggestion for DIGG
Allow him to think he's still gaming the system, but make sure his customers aren't seeing the results they are paying for.
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Re:
Anyway, I agree with you for once, but I think it's funny that you're aware of this fact. That tells me people take notice of such things and that tells me it could probably be used by smalltown bands to create buzz around their names and get them noticed in the larger news and music communities.
By the way, I visited your web site. Just wondering, did you license all those images? I could be wrong but I don't think they're all in the public domain. You didn't steal them did you? Nah, surely not, you wouldn't misuse someone elses intellectual property without compensating them would you.
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As for the small town bands using it, one of the problems of the internet is the ability for people to contort the system to fake public opinion. The bands won't break out, they will just raise the noise level some more and crowd out other stuff. Abused enough, public opinion sites become worthless.
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Re:
They're sort of a "Yeah, they did all the work to create the images, and they hold copyright, but technically by the law I can use them without paying for them so I'm cool with that, even if that means the poor saps don't profit."
On the other hand the uses that are usually at issue here are plainly and clearly within the intent of copyright but edging toward the grey area when it comes to certain businesses interpretations of the legal terminology. In that case you're all for compensation and restricting use.
It's plain and clear that you really don't care at all about compensating creators or rights holders or making it easy for them to continue creating, you only care that the letter of the law is followed, and then mostly when it's beneficial to big business.
By the way, it's really interesting that you credit the internet with making it easy to fake public opinion. The entire business plan of the radio and recording industries is to generate fake buzz and popularity to drive public interest towards the "stars" they've selected to groom.
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Sure, I believe it
As for the Marines... only a few thousand visitors? A few thousand interested visitors skewed toward the young, tech-savvy demographic that the Marines would so love to recruit from? That sounds like way better value for $200 than a straight Internet ad campaign.
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Re: Re:
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Now I Understand
Anti-gay, socialistic accusations and pro-Rush type articles and comments will be everywhere for a bit, but then they fade away again, as if people were going on and off shift at work...
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It must be true
Heck if I wanted I could go sign up for an account and say I am from President Obama's office and want all stories that look good promoted up.
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ROFL
You never will be again!
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Re: Sure, I believe it
I have a feeling the Morman church might see the publicity they have been getting from Prop8 as "positive coverage". However, they are marketing a brand like any other (and they obviously know this) so I can see where pretending your brand is the new hip and popular thing would be something they might jump on (especially with the DIGG demographic, the same one the Marines want . . . teenagers).
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digg traffic
Statistically, when an article frontpages, I'd roughly get about 5k hits for every 100 diggs. But digg's presentation algorithm is a threshold queue -- the feed is ordered based on when the link reached the threshold number of diggs. Comparatively, reddit just compares votes vs time, so a link can hover on the front page for a LONG time if people keep voting it up.
Then again, unless you're in the advertising specialty of branding (a CPI industry -- not to be confused with sales, which is a CPM industry), the traffic from these sites is generally worthless as it'll drop your CPM down to $.15 or less (myspace CPM is like $.08 - $.10 depending on your source). And to add on top of that, the vast majority will be using ad-block. I'm not saying that we should have laws to change this... just that in this CPM prevalent industry, aggregators send you a whole ton of worthless traffic.
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About buying Digg Votes
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About buying Digg Votes
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