Subvert and Profit

We have said since the beginning that Digg was only our first target. As we have grown, we have learned so much about how to game social media sites. We even survived a direct assualt by Digg one month ago, which forced us to make our system more complex. The new system has been refined many times over, and we can now call ourselves “experts” at this stuff.

Thus, the incubation stage is over, and we are going to spread, spread, spread! We will expand to sites in the order in which they have the most users and are easiest to game. After considering a few possible targets, StumbleUpon emerged as the clear winner. Here’s why:

• StumbleUpon has over 2.6 million users as of today and is the fastest growing social bookmarking service.
• Gaming activity is far less suspicious because there is no single public view of activity, unlike Digg. When a person sees a story on the front page of Digg with 80 votes, they can ask “why did 80 people vote for this?” In the case of StumbleUpon, users click the “Stumble!” button and are taken to a random page, which could have been voted for by 1 or 10,000 people, and the numbers are not apparent without further research.
• StumbleUpon also promotes its own advertisements, so there may be less outcry.
• StumbleUpon offers a linear traffic model. Digg is an all or nothing proposition, and many advertisers are afraid of wasting money if their story gets buried. Our StumbleUpon service will also allow advertisers with smaller budgets to use S&P.
• StumbleUpon users are far more diverse in their interests than the Digg crowd, and this allows more advertisers to use our service.

Why not Reddit?

Many people assumed that Reddit was going to be our next target, and even asked us if we would please expand to Reddit. However, Reddit is smaller than StumbleUpon, offers a traffic model that is more similar to Digg, and users’ votes are not set to be publicly shown by default.

Reddit is not for us.

The next few weeks

We are now accepting StumbleUpon users, though new Digg users are always welcome as well. Once we have a critical mass of StumbleUpon users, we will open up to advertisements, so stay tuned. Digg advertising will continue as normal.

Subvert and Profit is pleased to announce the advertiser referral program: starting right now, you will earn a 10% commission on every advertisement from every advertiser you refer to us!

This means that if you refer even one advertiser to us, and that advertiser buys 100 Diggs every week, you make $10 per week!  Or if you’re an advertiser, all you have to do is refer a few of your friends and you get free advertisements with us!

This program comes in addition to our very successful Digg user referral program.  With the two programs combined, you can start to make some serious cash.

So go forth and refer!  All you need is the same link you use to refer new Digg users, which can be found on your Digg user page.

Earlier in the week our host decided to upgrade to the newest version of Ruby on Rails without warning.  This caused our login engine to stop working and crashed the site,  so we had to put a new one in.  The new engine includes better referral links, as the old ones didn’t work half of the time.  Check ‘em out on your Digg user page.

We have also added an “I’m done” button for you to click when you have finished Digging a list of stories.  This helps us pay you faster, and ensures that we don’t accidentally miss anyone.

We’re still alive and strong!