I discovered this interesting site: Subvert and Profit. They essentially pay people to increase the rank of stories on Digg and StumpleUpon. Here's how it works:
- You pay Subvert and Profit some $$ to pimp your story on Digg
- Subvert and Profit then tells it's members to Digg your story.
- Members get paid for Digging the story and naturally Subvert and Profit take a cut.
- Your story on Digg is now on the home page. You now get a bunch of legitimate hits. Given the massive reach of a site like Digg this can give your website campaign a serious boost.
Subvert and Profit is nothing more than the 21st century 'rent a crowd'. Like all forms of broad advertising it still needs to be backed up with the fundamentals (call to action, value proposition etc etc).
I'm fascinated by this crowdsourcing approach as I am with other services like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.