Business Opportunities Weblog

September 14, 2006 by Dane Carlson | 5 Comments

According to Wikipedia, Digg is

a news website with an emphasis on technology and science articles. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control. News stories and websites are submitted by users, and then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system.

Getting a link on the front page of Digg can bring an enormous, server crushing, onslaught of traffic from Digg readers. What many don’t know though is how easy it really is to get to the front page, because every link they’ve ever submitted was only dugg, or voted for, by a couple of their friends and then languished in obscurity and brought neither traffic nor fame.

The key to Digg popularity, as even the neophyte can see, is to have enough friends that will automatically promote your stories without regard for the content of your link. This is exactly what has recently been uncovered by JP:

What it comes down to is there very literally is a group that controls Digg. If you are within this group and you submit a story, you are more or less guaranteed 10-15 (or more) automatic diggs from this group. What happens to the people who don’t have such a luxury and only get the default single vote like everyone else? This only encourages a cycle where those who are getting votes will continue to get more and more, as they feed each off each other and pat each other on the back.

One way to profit from this setup is to provide a service to connect people who will digg each other’s stories. I’m imagining a circle of people who will pay a monthly membership fee for access to each other, and who agree to vote for 3 stories from each of the other circle members per month. If the circle consists of 100 members, each of the stories submitted by members of the circle would receive at least 100 diggs, and each of the circle members would only be required to digg about 10 stories per day.

Each of these 100 stories would be practically guaranteed to reach the front page of Digg where momentum should take over when other users start digging the stories.

A basic problem with this scenario, though, is that it would be relatively easy for Digg to discover the links submitted by members of circle, because the first 100 or so people that vote for each of their submissions would always be the same. The solution would be to randomly select the 100 members of the circle for each submission from a larger pool, thus insuring that the same people aren’t digging stories over and over again.

Digg this article.

In Ideas | 5 Comments
Tags: Marketing