Crowdsourcing: Can You Digg It?

Crowdsourcing, just in case anyone out there is still in the dark about the term, is the practice of having a whole bunch of people come together in a specified location to achieve a common goal by way of their sheer numerical presence there. In the real world, this can mean filling a particular store to the brim while collectively demanding a discount on a particular item; on the internet the practice can be employed for a variety of purposes – some of them less innocent than others.

In a recent Wired reprint of a story by Assignment Zero, the so called “dark side” of internet crowdsourcing is discussed in an interview with one its main perpetrators, a 19 year old anonymous “cyberpirate” who goes by the name of Ragnar Danneskjold and who heads the organization Subvert and Profit.

What Subvert and Profit does is a kind of guerrilla advertising whereby they attempt to promote certain corporations by strategically crowdsourcing articles relevant to them on Digg in order to draw them to the front page of the list. What they manage is quite impressive, and in broad terms indicates a shift in the way advertisers are thinking about product placement in an increasingly savvy and niche-driven market.

Ragnar Danneskjold has some rather interesting things to say about the practice:

Subvert and Profit fills the niche market for ‘darker’ crowdsourced actions. Beginning by operating a black market for votes on social bookmarking services, S&P will bootstrap itself towards operating a full-fledged crowdsourcing marketplace for clandestine actions on the Internet. Striving to maintain our allure and underground appeal, we seek to represent the fundamentally subversive nature of the Internet.

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.

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.

It’s a pretty fascinating way of getting your product out there. A few years ago most corporations would never have permitted such a shady, clandestine form of marketing, but more and more it seems that anything goes in today’s digitalized and hyperactive marketplace.

In any case, it will be interesting to see how long Subvert and Profit can really last before their ship is sunk, but it’s highly probable there will be plenty of people ready and willing to pick up the banner if it actually happens.

Full interview: Exploring the Dark Side of Crowdsourcing