Subvert and Profit

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Subversion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.