Digg the social media murketing landscape

From an interview with a guy who runs something called Subvert & Profit, which “makes a business out of gaming social media site Digg for paying advertisers.” Basically, advertisers pay the company to get its secret team to Digg stories onto that famous social-media site’s front page, or at least as close as possible.

Q: Is [your company] the future of online advertising?

A: Our type of business will certainly become a larger part of advertising, potentially off the Internet as well. Forget about social media for a bit, and consider that S&P pioneers a mixture of two quickly rising paradigms: crowdsourcing and undercover marketing. Gaming social media sites is just a subset of that mixture.

Q: Does it work for your advertisers? How much are clients paying on average? For how many eyeballs?

A: Our system has successfully placed a good deal of content on the front page of Digg. At this point, 2 out of 3 advertisements are successful, and we’re getting better. Ultimately our attempts are at the mercy of the Digg community. The average client buys 70 Diggs, though some clients prefer to gamble by purchasing 10-20, hoping that regular Digg users will carry them the rest of the way. We haven’t collected enough data from satisfied advertisers, though I’ve heard a story on Digg gets roughly 10,000 visitors. Once a blog I run under another name got over 30,000. All of this translates to organic marketing that is an order of magnitude cheaper than most other forms of Internet advertising.