Posted on Wednesday 25th of October 2006 at 05:45 in The Internet

Digg - the cheapest advertising possible?

This is purely a hypothetical situation, but what would happen if a company had a product they wished to sell, could they use Digg as the cheapest advertising medium possible? Can you hire Indians (or other users) to promote you to the front page and gain thousands of visitors?

It's been submitted numerous times that services have come and gone, offering traffic on a pay-per-digg basis and from what I understand, all of these have failed to take off. However, let it not be forgotten the benefits of sitting on the Digg front page. Thousands of users visiting the site, other sites then link to that site, people blog about it, people link to it and before long a good idea/service is spread virally around the internet. What would happen if this was used for evil? What would happen if a T-Shirt company (for example) decided that they could reach their target audience on Digg?

How could this be done? Well, very simply of course with some minimal financial outlay... Let me explain.

Digg is a site with an indescribably large number of visitors each day where many new technologies are brought to light, funny things located and general news items submitted and discussed. It is commonly documented that "the Digg effect" is where a site that reaches the front page of Digg has so many visitors that it falls down under the strain - so clearly an advertisers dream?

Digg allows users to submit articles/stories/etc of interest, which users then "vote" on, marking the submission as good/interesting or not. While no one has managed to quantify how many "Diggs" are required to actually make it onto the front page, popular theory is that around 51 Diggs in a 24hour period will do the trick. But, the key problem is getting people to Digg your submission (evil or otherwise).

However, what would happen if a company wished to hire users? Theoretically, you outsource 60 workers from India (for example), paying each $5 for a couple of minutes work to register, browse around and Digg your submission within a 12-24 hour period (making it look like a steady, normal progression of support). This would most likely trigger the Digg engine to promote you to the front page (seeing as the promotion is automated) - meaning you have reached (potentially) hundreds of thousands of views for as little as $300. Realistically the click-throughs to the site could be between 5-6,000. Still, good value for $300.

$300 for 5,000 potential customers (or more) = Bargain

There are a few issues to take with this of course, a high number of visitors does not necessarily correlate to sales - but it helps. Also, as mentioned previously, being in such a position on a site such as Digg will carry word of your product/service far and wide, even if you are caught out as having cheated - you'll be "that company who cheated", instantly generating a name. Oscar Wilde himself said "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about" and this is clearly representative of advertising.

Digg does have mechanisms in place for stopping this sort of "spamming", where the overall common sense of users is likely to "bury" your submission and mark it as spam. Although, there is a chance that enough users will actually like what you're selling and Digg it in turn...

 

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