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!

The recent Digg honey pot attack, while it was a hassle and did some damage, has left Subvert and Profit essentially intact.  We lost a chunk of users, either to banning or to our new policy of only allowing trusted users to vote, but many of them have switched in a new Digg account.  We are still running advertisements at the same rate… in fact, our trusted users are now happier because they have more things to Digg.

By falling back onto our trusted users, we ensure that our operation will continue without honey pot attacks in the future.  This may slow our growth until we expand to our next site, but it is definitely worth it.

If you have been banned and have not yet entered your new account on your Digg user page, here are the very simple steps:

• Delete your browser cookies.  On Firefox this is Tools >> Clear Private Data, and on Internet Explorer this is Tools >> Delete browsing history >> Delete cookies
• Download Tor if you don’t already have it.  Tor anonymizes your IP address, so Digg cannot associate you with your old account.  Then download the Torbutton extension for Firefox.  You should really just use Firefox for Subvert and Profit work.
• Create a new account on Digg.  You know the deal here.
• Enter it into your Subvert and Profit user page, and you’re set!

The attack has been good for us, since we were forced to think deeper about strategy, both for the present and going forward.  Stick around with us: we’ll be sticking around for a while.

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.

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!