Want On The Digg Home Page? That'll Be $1,200.
InvespBlog has published what it claims is an interview with a top Digg user - someone who has a 34% success ratio in getting submitted stories to the home page of Digg. The Digg user isn't named - he or she says “I have a reputation to withhold” (we know what they meant).
Context & Ripple Effects
Digg's home page has long been treated as a traffic jackpot worth gaming — CNET documented organized manipulation as early as the big Digg rig in late 2006. What's new here is the pricing: an anonymous power user tells InvespBlog that front-page placement can simply be bought for $1,200, backed by a claimed 34% success rate. The revelation lands awkwardly for a company then shopping itself around — Digg had just hired a bank hoping to sell for $300 million or more, and a credible market for paid votes undermines the community-driven curation story underpinning that valuation.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and PR buyers now have a quoted price for guaranteed-ish Digg exposure, converting what was informal vote-swapping (documented rigging since 2006) into an overt marketplace.
- Digg faces immediate pressure to prove its voting algorithm can detect purchased diggs, since every undetected sale erodes the trust of organic submitters who drive the site's content.
Second-order effects
- Rival social news sites can position themselves as harder to game, competing for the same submitter base on integrity rather than scale.
- If buyers conclude $1,200 reliably buys front-page reach, demand should bid up prices and professionalize the gray market — more brokers, bundled packages, and volume discounts — forcing platforms across the space to invest in anti-manipulation tooling.
Third-order effects
- A persistent paid-placement market points toward a structural split between 'organic' community signals and bought ones — a credibility tax on user-voted ranking models that recurs whenever distribution is valuable enough to price.
- Sustained manipulation could eventually invite platform-level countermeasures (algorithmic detection, identity requirements) or advertiser skepticism about crowd-curated traffic, reshaping how social news sites monetize at all.
The trend: As user-voted distribution becomes commercially valuable, an underground market for influence inevitably forms — and each platform's survival depends on whether it can price out the manipulators before they price out its credibility.