Staska.Net

Yesterday Wired published a story how they bought votes on Digg and how Digg’s systems designed to prevent manipulation doesn’t work. But if you look deeper into the published facts, they prove the opposite - Digg gaming attempts did not work and were a waste of money.

Wired reporter Annalee Newitz mentions that, in addition to her own Pictures of Crowds blog, she noticed two other stories being manipulated by the same service. One story was $35 Coupon, another - Photoshop Tutorial.

What Newitz forgets to mention, is that both of these stories, while receiving (and probably paying for) a number of Diggs (65) that should have easily carried them to the front page, where promptly recognized and buried by Digg community before getting there.

While Pictures of Crowds post fared a little better and managed to make it to the home page getting 121 Diggs, Newitz herself admits that “Digg community recognized that my blog was stupid” and buried it. Since the article managed to get only 121 digg, my guess is that it was buried promptly.

Only 1 of the 3 manipulated stories managed to get to Digg home page. Not as impressive as saying “I paid for votes and got my story on Digg frontpage”? Now let’s look at the money.

According to Wired, the price for Digg votes is - $20 sign up fee and the $1 per digg. What did the persons paying for Digg votes get for the money they’ve spent?

Well, the money spent on Coupon story and Photoshop story was obviously wasted. That’s $80 per story down the drain.

As for CrowdHacking blog, getting on the front page of Digg did not do much for it. Apart from a crashed server and probably 10K pageviews that digg crowd generated, there’s nothing much to show for $120 spent and $450 risked on Digg votes.

They did not report any increase in subscribers to the blog. Digg crowd moved on an promptly forgot about it. If you look at Technorati, the only links that the story got are from social news aggregators like reddiggulo.us and doggdot.us and a couple of scraper blogs. (Of course, you have to look at links before March 01, since lots of sites started linking CrowdHacking after Wired published the story)

So let’s summarize:

• Only 1 of 3 manipulated stories got to Digg front page
• $160 spent on Digg votes for failed articles was wasted
• The story that got to Digg FP was promptly buried
• It cost the author $120, with $450 on the line
• It got 10K pageviews from advertising inert Digg crowd
• No significant increase in subscribers
• A link from reddiggulo.us, a link from doggdot.us, and 2 links from PR 0 scraper sites

Just looking at the facts provided by Wired, you can clearly see that spending money for votes on Digg to promote crappy content doesn’t really pay. At least I can think of any number of better ways to spend $300-500 promoting a site.

Looks like Michael Arrington is right - Condé Nast, which owns Digg competitor Reddit and Wired Magazine “is hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart”.

And all the facts be damned