Subvert and Profit

*UPDATE* Everything is back up now, so we’ll begin verifying everyone’s activity.  There are a few stories in the queue, so stay tuned.

subvertandprofit.com is currently not functional due to our server going down. We have contacted our host and things should be back to normal within a few hours.

Since we’ve started off on shared webhosting, we’ve been prone to downtime of our Ruby on Rails server. Unfortunately few shared webhosts know how to configure their servers properly to keep Ruby going. We’ll be switching to our very own dedicated server once we have enough money (should be soon, if today’s success is any measure).

Fortunately we finished off a set of advertisements before the server died. Operation will begin normally as soon as we’re up again.

During the first three days of our operation, we have placed a good number of stories (both paid and random) on the front page of Digg. As far as we can tell, none of our users have been banned. We have kept almost all of our users busy.

Many of you have been asking when you can expect to see money in your account. We place money in your account once we have verified your activity. We try to verify all Digging activity for a day all at once, and we should be doing this within the next hour. *Update* Since our Ruby on Rails server decided to crap out tonight, we will verify your activity once it is up again.

A few of you encountered a couple minor bugs in the system. Thanks to your feedback, these bugs are now gone.

Operation will only get smoother, cleaner, and faster from here.

We are happy to announce that Subvert and Profit is now open for business!

To make sure our launch runs smoothly, we are beginning with a small number of pre-scheduled advertisements from the very first advertisers to put money into their accounts.  We will open up the interface to all other advertisers once these have been successfully placed.  Check back towards the end of Tuesday.  Advertisers hoping to get on Digg’s front page at a certain time should come to us about 4-8 hours before they want to get on the front page.

If you are a Digg user, you can log into your account to see if you have stories to Digg.  We are approving a small number of Diggs at first to ensure that enough users Digg these stories, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see anything yet.  Once we get data about user Digging, we can expand the number of advertisements we accept to keep our entire user pool busy.

Read the guidelines, and then go get ‘em!

After implementing some new, clever improvements to our randomization algorithm, we are now ready to give a date for our launch.

Subvert and Profit will be officially open for business on Monday, April 23rd.

In preparation for the launch, we have opened our finance section.  Advertisers will be served during the launch based on the order in which they added funds to their account, with the important exception that we reserve the right to reject any advertisement.  We are trying to keep our visible impact minimal, and this means rejecting advertisements that would very obviously never make it to the front page of Digg.  Please keep this in mind before adding funds to your account.

We apologize for the extended delay.  After reviewing our algorithms, we came up with some new ways to prevent Digg from setting up a honey pot on our site.  We decided it would be worth it to wait the extra week as we implemented these improvements.

Help our launch be successful by logging in on Monday!

As we put final touches on the Subvert and Profit technology, we would like everyone to read the brand new Guidelines for Digg users and advertisers. We wrote these guidelines so our users and advertisers will be prepared for a smooth launch.

We’re just as excited as you are for the big day, which is just around the corner.

Digg users: Hang in there and continue referring your friends. It’s almost time.

Advertisers: Expect an exciting announcement by Monday. We’re almost ready for you.

Until next time, Subvert and Profit!

After a week of awesome blogosphere coverage, we are approaching critical mass of users. What’s most interesting to us is that 10% of people who visit our site register for an account. Things are shaping up for an awesome launch.

We’ve decided to grease your palms even more for helping us build this site. We’ll now pay you 20% of the income of any user your refer to this site. This offer is amazing. You could actually make hundreds of dollars per month just by getting all of your friends to Digg for us. What’s more, there is absolutely zero cost to you. Do it!

With all this good news, we are almost ready to launch. We won’t give a date, but it may be this week.

Subvert and Profit!

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.

The degree to which our algorithm works is based on the number of users we have.  This is precisely why we are registering Digg users for a while before we accept advertisers… and from the rate at which people have been signing up, it looks like we’ll be ready to start soon.

Content-pushers and social bookmarkers rejoice! The democracy of web 2.0 is about to get a major dose of capitalism as the crowdsourcing revolution begins. This revolution will bring you money, should you choose to embrace it. Subvert and Profit, our brand new site, is leading the charge.

Before we start the party, let’s make some definitions:

“Crowdsourcing” refers to hiring the masses of Internet users to perform a task. At Subvert and Profit, this means paying users of social bookmarking websites to promote content organically. For users of these sites, this means getting paid to do what you already do: vote for stories. We’ll pay you $0.50 (or $0.75 if you’re one of the first 500 users to sign up) for every paid story you vote for, with a handful of random stories thrown in. For promoters, crowdsourcing is the cheapest way to get new visitors to your site (think $0.003 per visitor). Our crowdsourcing efforts are a subset of “black marketing,” which refers to advertising in a non-traditional, questionably ethical manner.

Oh yeah, ethics. We’re sure some of you might be disappointed, angry, or otherwise upset with our shameless, parasitic, practices. From our perspective, we are doing what the entrepreneur does, finding an unfilled niche in the economy and capitalizing on it… this is where any ethical analysis should begin and end. And while we are parasites, we do not wish to kill our hosts. Furthermore, the democracy of web 2.0 is already hacked, rigged, and flawed enough for our impact to go unnoticed.

Take Digg.com, our first host, for example. A large percentage of stories you see on the front page are placed there by a cabal of users… but do most people care? As far as we can tell, Digg is still growing strong, and its users enjoy the service. Any further rigging by us will be similarly trivial as far as the average user’s perception of Digg’s integrity. We will monitor our impact to make sure it doesn’t grow too large.

We know we are not the first site to do this, but we feel we are the first competent site to do this. Our competitors fail to protect the privacy of their users, and as a result they get banned before they see any money. We have spent a long time programming some excellent algorithms that will prevent our users from being tracked. Your paid Digging activity will not show up on the radar as suspicious, so you’ll never be banned.

For the next week or so, we’ll be signing up Digg users. Once we feel we have enough to promote stories effectively, we’ll open up for submissions too. Read about everything in the FAQ, or contact us if you want more information.

Whether user or advertiser, you should sign up for an account right now. Let the black marketing revolution begin!