Make money by digging. Ethics aside, does it really work?

Digg.com is a popular social bookmarketing site in which its users submit news stories and blogs, which are promoted on its front page, or filed under various headings such as world and business news. Its users ‘digg’ or rank the stories they like, which effectively promotes the stories, thereby bringing traffic to their website. In comes usersubmitter.com, a site launched in ’06 which offers a service that pays users .50 cents to digg articles. But how exactly is usersubmitter able to pay its users… “if you run a website which has articles on it, to drive traffic to the site you pay User/Submitter a base amount of $20 and $1 per each digg. Digg.com flashes your post on its front page only if the post has been dug at least 51 times within 24 hours. A post on the front page of the digg.com can drive 10,000 to 15,000 users to the site which roughly translates to $400-$500 Adsense dollars. So by paying $20 base + $1 for each digg getting a huge amount of traffic which eventually means hard cash is not a bad deal at all.”

Does it really work?

Hmm…half a dollar per digg, and several hours at the computer, that could be a lot of money! By this time, any persuasive arguments in ethics class went out the window of my mind, I’m going to be rich!! So driven by greed, I made a username on usersubmitter.com and was ready to get to work. But, then reality soon made an appearance and stuck its nosy head it my door (it always seems to). The program didn’t work as effectively as I thought, maybe that’s an understatement… it didn’t really work at all. For the first few days, while I was online, I’d check whether there were any stories for me to digg. However I’d keep getting the same, old annoying message: “At this time, there are no stories to digg…” Now, a week later I have resigned myself to the fact easy money doesn’t really exists (actually I’ve come to this conclusion several times, but it never seems to sink in.) In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been ethical to make money in this way, because essentially its exploiting diggs.com’s service. But sometimes I feel ethics are only beneficial when they are convenient to me, that is they if they don’t get in the way of my motivations. Am I alone? (much of the affiliate marketing I see online (ebooks) tells me no!)

References: http://tnerd.com/2006/10/03/diggcom-how-to-make-money-from-diggcom/ (quoted material)