Crowdsourcing and Black Marketing, An Introduction
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!
Haha, I love this site! I agree, Digg is already corrupt beyond measure… and yet thousands of people visit it for their news every day.
Good luck!
Hey!! Found your blog on yahoo while searching for marketing ethics - quite some good info thanks, J.Kopler