Diggers Are Getting Paid (But Not By Kevin Rose)
Top Diggers are routinely being emailed with unsolicited requests from private companies to help them submit and promote their own stories., in exchange for money. The frequency is in around once a week or perhaps even more frequently, and is as inelegant as the following:
My name is xxxx and I have been recently promoted as xxxx at xxxx. Our company sells xxxxx . My job is to get people interested in our site, but my problem is that I have not had any success. While searching the web for possible business partners, I started to read about Digg and its popularity…that’s where you come into play. Given the fact that you are the xxxxx user at the website as well as xxxxx, I am contacting you to see if I can somehow recruit you to start getting the word out about our service.
Please check us out, see what you think and get back to me.
Some Diggers have taken up some of these offers at sums that are shockingly modest. Some of the payments are structured as retainers, a set fee per month, and in other cases, they are structured much more like a pay per submission, with bonuses if a story makes it to the front page.
When questioned, one Digger said something to the effect of "they were things I was going to submit anyway — and if Kevin Rose isn’t going to pay me for my time, maybe someone else will".
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