Del.icio.us Competitors Try Paying Users
At least two Del.icio.us competitors, Simpy and RawSugar (profiles) have begun paying users to use and promote their services. While the companies have different payment models, both pay based on traffic generated at a particular users page containing the user's bookmarks.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands two months after Yahoo absorbed del.icio.us in December 2005, which left the social-bookmarking field with an incumbent backed by a portal giant and a crowd of independents scrambling for a wedge.
Simpy and RawSugar's answer is to invert the model that made del.icio.us work voluntarily — the power-user behavior catalogued in Slacker Manager's guide to successful del.icio.us users becomes a paid activity, with both startups tying payouts to traffic on each member's bookmarks page.
First-order effects
- Simpy and RawSugar convert their most active members from free contributors into traffic-driven promoters, making payment size a direct function of how much audience each bookmarks page attracts.
- Del.icio.us, now inside Yahoo, faces challengers competing on cash rather than features — a contest the incumbent can ignore unless defection among its heaviest users shows up in its numbers.
Second-order effects
- Traffic-based payouts give members an incentive to inflate visits to their own pages, so both services take on moderation and anti-gaming costs that voluntary networks never carried.
- Other independent bookmarking rivals must now choose between matching the payments, differentiating on trust and quality, or ceding the growth race to whoever funds its user base.
Third-order effects
- If paid participation spreads, the line between organic community contribution and compensated promotion erodes across social media, pushing platforms toward explicit incentive design and raising the question of whether traffic-bought bookmarks carry the same discovery value as volunteered ones.
The trend: Social bookmarking is shifting from volunteer communities toward paid-user acquisition models, with Yahoo's consolidation of del.icio.us forcing independents to buy the engagement their rivals got for free.