Subvert and Profit

Effective May 16, 2008, each vote for your Digg, StumbleUpon or YouTube content will cost $1.50. Social network users will be paid $0.75 per assignment. You can also earn fees of 10% on advertiser and $0.10 per vote on social user referrals.

Subvert and Profit is a market placement agent for crowdsource voting on traffic-ranked content. Advertisers, bloggers and video/song promoters buy votes on their content from Subvert and Profit and our 15,000 worldwide unique users are paid to place votes and make comments on that content. Now our uniquely placed votes are more of a bargain relative to traditional online campaigns. As market factors change and as the page rank algorithms of our host social network sites vary, Subvert and Profit will continue to maximize value to our advertisers and users.

We enjoy helping you with content placements to maximize traffic as you Subvert and Profit!

Most Excellent Crowdsourcers:

2007 was an awesome year for social media undercover marketing. We have enjoyed helping to steer ultra-low cost traffic to advertiser-placed content. With his unique concept proven and our reach expanded to additional social media sites, the growth in traffic has surpassed our expectations.

New Payouts and Pricing:

The crowdsourcing marketing revolution continues into 2008 with new ad placement pricing and increased user payouts! Effective January 16, 2008, each vote for your Digg, StumbleUpon or YouTube content will cost $2.00. Social network users will be paid $1.00 per assignment. You can also earn fees of 10% on advertiser and social user referrals. Ads placed and assigned before January 16, 2008 will carry 2007 pricing.

We look forward to helping your with your content placements to maximize your traffic as you Subvert and Profit!

We thought we’d share these testimonials from our inbox:

December 2007

Hi Vasili,
I tested out your service yesterday – only bought 40 votes on Digg and 10 stumbles. I know I should have done more votes to make the article more popular – I’m not moaning
Anyway the system works and I just have a few more questions that will help me in the future:- … {best time to submit?; USA time? Buy diggs in batches?}…
Cheers for your time,
John

November 2007

Ivan,….
We made the homepage… I think the digg editor MANUALLY promoted the story since it was gone from the upcoming queue

October 2007

Vasili,
As of now, I have received 122K visitors the first day and 27K visitors today, of which probably ~100K came from Digg and another ~30K from Reddit (the story was on front page for >24 hours and in top 10 for >12 hours) and another ~10K probably from other sources.
This has been a great deal for me and I very much look forward to working with you in future.
Best wishes,
(Name redacted)

September 2007

Hello Ragnar,
The experience of seeing diggs accumulate, the transition from upcoming to popular the moment it occurs, and the mind-boggling barrage of traffic which comes next, is nothing less than euphoric. Each week I look forward to making digg popular. My only regret is that I didn’t discover Subvert and Profit until now.
Thank you Sir,
Ricardo

And… action! Subvert and Profit has expanded to YouTube!

Now, upcoming artists, amateur comedians, and video podcasters can have content pumped by over 9,000 Subvert and Profit crowdsourcers worldwide.

There are three easy steps:

1. Submit your video to YouTube.
2. Post the video to Digg or StumbleUpon.
3. Use Subvert and Profit to purchase votes for the Digg or StumbleUpon link.

We will provide that springboard of views to drive widespread organic traffic your way! With the traffic increase generated by a prominent position on Digg, your YouTube video could be the next Numa Numa Dance!

Social network users:

We’d just like to say thank you for your work on content placement and vote execution. With your help, we are currently running dozens of fresh advertisements every week. You are now among 5,000 users worldwide.

To maximize your earnings, set up accounts on both Digg and StumbleUpon. If you haven’t read the guidelines recently, refresh yourself today (http://subvertandprofit.com/content/guidelines). Many of you have taken advantage of our user referral program — but did you know that we will also pay you to refer advertisers? Check the site to learn more.

Advertisers:

We’ve had quite a bit of success assisting you in driving boatloads of traffic cheaply to your sites. Keep up the great work with creative headlines and eye-catching content to reduce the risk of being buried. We have removed the 30 vote limit for StumbleUpon advertisements.

Our users are ready to pump your new content, and we are here to serve you.

Until next time, Subvert and Profit!

Ragnar Danneskjold

Did you know our advertisers’ Web content is being pumped by thousands of Subvert and Profit social users around the world? Subvert and Profit has now expanded to Poland with crowdsourcing across the time zones to stoke your site traffic! Visit http://subvertandprofit.pl/. Among our top geographies, Poland owes its thanks to Michal.

It has been a busy few days since we reopened at the beginning of the week. We wanted to let you know about some of the issues we have resolved recently and what you can expect in the near future.

Recent issues:

• After we opened account access, if you tried to purchase advertisements, you may have found a message about the server move last month. The page for purchasing advertisements is now open for everyone and we apologize for the inconvenience.
• If you tried to create an account recently, you may have run into the same message.
• We reached the maximum number of emails we could send per hour several times this week. Suffice it to say, we can now send unlimited emails. If you missed the major announcements at the beginning of the week, send us an email and we’ll fill you in.

The future:

• We have a queue of pending withdrawal requests from social users. We will be approving them and sending out payments over the next week or so.
• It takes less than an hour now for us to verify new Digg and StumbleUpon accounts. If you have an unverified account that has lasted longer than that, send us an email.
• The blog is now up and running.
• Stay tuned over the next several weeks for new features and deals.

We’re excited that we’re now up and running and operating smoothly. As always, send us an email if you have any issues or requests. Until next time, Subvert and Profit!

With deep sadness, the Subvert and Profit team brings you news of a tragic accident last month that took the life of one of our founders. The past weeks have been very difficult for family, friends and fellow crowdsourcing marketers. The sudden sense of personal shock and grief contrasted starkly with the euphoria and vibrancy associated with the innovative expansion that has been underway here at Subvert and Profit.

Nonetheless, we must apologize for the resulting effects that, until now, have given us pause in accepting your content and votes. As we are celebrating the life of one of our brilliant undercover marketing pioneers, we are uplifted to know of your support, and we are at your service to assist you in high-rank placements and content voting assignments.

Last month we moved to a new dedicated server. The move was successful, and we apologize to those of you who may have thought that we spent the last month figuring out the new server, when in fact we spent it figuring out how to move on in the face of tragedy. We will be opening account access again within the next week, and we will send out another announcement when that happens. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Update - easy as subverting Digg and SU, we’re now on our own server.

Hi all,

We are proud to announce that we are about to move to our first dedicated server. The transition is scheduled for Saturday, so we will stop accepting new advertisements Friday afternoon. We’re hoping to make the jump quickly, but if something unforseen arises, we could be out for a day or two.

Please bear with us during the transition, and we’ll catch you on the flip side.

You may have noticed that we have been keeping relatively quiet recently. We have been scheming behind our closed doors, patiently awaiting the right time for our next big move. Our service has grown faster than we expected, so we have also been dealing with some scaling issues. We are taking a careful, measured approach to our expansion going forward. There are many exciting new things in the works. As we close out our fourth month of running advertisements, we are taking time to reflect on everything we have learned gaming Digg and StumbleUpon.

Digg - quality over quantity

We have always known that “spammy” advertisements are going to get buried by the Digg community, and we continue to reject them. Our service has proven most useful for stories with merit that need the critical first bump to get exposure. Similarly, our service has been successfully used to propel stories already on the front page into the day’s top 10 list. Since this is the case, we have been seeking out advertisers most suited to Digg, and we have had great success doing so. While some argue that these advertisers don’t need our service anyway, our experience has proven this overwhelmingly false. As much as some like to fantasize about Digg as a democratic meritocracy, if you have nothing going for you besides good content, you will not make it onto the front page. Good content is only half the battle, and Subvert and Profit has become a convenient, one-stop-shop for “the other half.” The front page of Digg remains dominated by the various cabals of top users, and Subvert and Profit provides the means to bypass their ring of control.

StumbleUpon - tricky tricky

In the past month we have become much more familiar with the complexity of the StumbleUpon algorithm. Advertiser’s reports of traffic have varied greatly since the beginning, though on average, they have been close to what we predicted. Patterns were initially difficult to single out. After much contemplation of our early results, though, we have gained key insights into the algorithm, and have started applying them. Votes on StumbleUpon are weighted significantly by a list of conditions. For example, a vote is weighted more heavily if the user adds tags or writes a review. The next iterations of our service are going to include drastic improvements that will optimally manipulate these conditions.

That’s all for now. You can expect some upgrades to the functionality and interface of Subvert and Profit over the next few weeks, and some key announcements in September.