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Having had conversations with many top diggers, I'd say everything in this interview is right on the money.
@gregfinn - What evidence would you like to see? Do you want the top diggers to name names and get themselves banned?
This article is Sphinn worthy because it shows an underside to Digg that everyone in the game knows about, but most people from the outside won't acknowledge.
What T&C does it violate for readers to click on ads of their chocie? The readers of a blog aren't a party to the contract between the blogger and the advertiser. Now if the blogger encourages people to click, then yes that may violate an agreement.
But what Seth is talking about is people understanding that content can't really be "free" -- somebody has to get paid at some point or it will just fade away. Clicking on ads that you've got interest in is a completely valid way of voting for a blog. What's outrageous is that people run things like adblock and completely refuse to click any ads. That's like going over to someone's house, drinking all their beer, and never once offering to bring beer or chip in.
In the long run this will help advertisers. Right now they pay more for clicks because there are so few of them. If click through rates go up in general, the cost will come down as supply expands. Advertisers can then work on their conversions rather than relying upon people to self select. It will also help bloggers, because if you're not big enough to attract impression only advertising, it's pretty tough to make a buck from click through ads.
What is it about Web 2.0 that has made users expect that everything is free? Where else in life is that true?
@DMCAFiler - I'm not saying people should click willy-nilly on ads just to tip the author, but I am saying that they shouldn't have their blinders on when reading free content. If you like what you're reading, check the ads to see if there's also something you'd be interested in.
"Nobody believes this." - I know of at least one person that does.
As an advertiser, the highly qualified people you're after tend to ignore ads completely. If they start looking at ads, it's better for everyone. And it doesn't do advertisers any good at all to have content dry up because bloggers can't make more than a few cents a day from Adsense. Part of the reason advertisers are so touchy about "less qualified clicks" is that the price of clicks is fairly high because they're so few and far between.
If click through rates went up across the board because everyone was following Seth's advice, Google wouldn't be able to do that. The market would adjust.
Story: The Trouble with Twitter
I went through and analyzed every business mode I could think of and what I've read from other people. They just can't bring in enough revenue to justify the amount of VC money they've taken. Look for the VCs to pull the trigger on a fire sale. http://sphinn.com/story/67155
Story: The Trouble with Twitter
@NickWilsdon - Why would it have to be another startup that starts to compete with them? There's not enough IP in Twitter to justify a purchase for Google, Yahoo, MS, etc, at anything other than fire sale prices, but that doesn't mean they couldn't integrate a free version into their product set that they built themselves.
Story: The Trouble with Twitter
@Fitz - the problem with revolutionary business models is that you have to evangelize. While twitter could add banner ads to their site and just piggyback onto the well developed market and mechanisms for delivering that kind of advertising, the exotic ad methods that people are suggesting don't have any infrastructure to support them. Getting Coca-Cola to buy sponsorship becomes a corporate sale. Twitter would need marketing, sales teams, proposals, etc to be able to sell that kind of program. That's way outside of the skill set that they've demonstrated that they have. $15M is not enough to get the job done.
Barack Obama leads with 60K+ followers on Twitter. How many corporate brands are going to attract that much attention? How much is it worth to send someone a 140-character tweet? If it's worth 1 cent per user/day, that's only $219K/year in revenue. Your sales cost in going after an account like that is easily $50K. And you're going to spend money chasing a lot of accounts that aren't going to work out. Or do you charge just for click throughs? What is the conversion rate on tweets? Heck, I miss a lot of tweets from people I want to hear from, much less corporate advertising. And the more corporate sponsorships you sell, the less they're each worth. And frankly, what corporate type in his right mind would stick his neck out and write a check for $200K to a startup that hasn't yet figured out how to make money? Getting those first accounts is going to be quite difficult. It's not like Twitter has an experienced team to execute on all these ideas.
There are a lot of pie in the sky ideas about how Twitter can make money, but I have yet to see anything that will stand up to financial analysis. Twitter has $15M in venture capital. That's not nearly enough to build 7 different revenue streams, none of which have been successfully implemented before.
As much as I'd like Twitter to be a success, they're partying like it's 1999.
Update: I received an automated email from Twitter promising to look into my situation, but so far no further response. I'm at 666 Following and 705 Followers.
Story: The Worlds Largest Digger
In what universe would pressing the Digg button too many times be considered spamming?
I'd like to know when the bury brigade is going to be banned from Digg for using a Greasemonkey script to mark sites they don't like as spam.
I need to get my RSS treated immediately! I guess that explains why people outside of my family won't read my blog.
Sadly, even though the video is a just a joke, most of us live in a fairly isolated world where all of the people we know are technically aware. But there are still a huge number of people that can't distinguish between The Google and The Intarweb.
Attention all Sphinners! Your sites with sitemeter on them are currently down to IE 7 users.
Sitemeter appears to have fixed the problem with the badges. Not sure I trust them enough to turn it back on though.
Story: How NOT to Build Reputation
The other example is Paris Hilton, who is famous for being famous. Frankly, I suspect that the very best SEOs are smart enough to keep a low profile.
@ChrisLang - the problem is that the search engines can't blanket penalize people for having lots of social media links, even if the footprint is clearly identifiable. What would stop a black hat from creating a social media avatar that did nothing but submit YOUR site to every site available?
The search engines can discount external links, but they can't penalize a site for having external links. I suspect we'll see social media links heavily discounted in the future, so the utility of this type of software will diminish. But you can't deny the short term effectiveness of putting out a bunch of social media links. Drop a link on Digg and you get crawled within the hour.
Pligg just sent out an email announcing a new security release. Open Source is great, but the downside is the bad guys get to look at the code to look for vulnerabilities.
I think that age is a lot less important than it used to be. Lots of on-point content on a constantly growing basis, with lots of backlinks growing as well will bypass very established but static sites in a matter of months.
Not all complaints are legitimate. Some are from competitors trying to make things look bad for you. It's one of the nastier black hat attacks.
I wouldn't get too worked up about the people that hate SEOs. How many of them are in your target market? By definition, they're not in the market to purchase SEO services. The people that need to be educated about the value of SEOs are the business people that will purchase your services, not the college students ranting about what you submit on StumbleUpon.
#2 Google can’t wait to take the Digg mafia out and kick their ass.
I don't think Google is too worried about SEO blogs not being able to get links or traffic from Digg. In fact, with more access under the hood, we could see the link juice that Digg passes change dramatically. Remember the Google warning last January about the slapdown coming for people that only promote their own stuff on social networks?
#4 Digg has massive traffic and the data centers already in place to handle it.
Have you seen how much Digg has been down lately? Their pages take forever to load. Perhaps Google will get rid of the js errors Digg generates on their ads. Don't get me started on the unreliability of the Digg API. My guess is that stuff all moves into the Google cloud.
I wonder if all the Digg accounts will have to be rebord as google accounts? And are we going to get those annoying captchas everywhere?
#6 The new Microsoft deal to display advertising on Digg will go bye bye.
That's an interesting one. The way for Google to attack MS is to buy up the major content providers that provide them ad revenue. $200M is a pretty cheap price to shake people's confidence in the MS ad network.
Story: An interview with Digg top user