Saturday, August 30, 2008

Reflective Thoughts on Subvert and Profit - 3 Months of Profits

image It has been at least 3 months since I signed up for Subvert and Profit, a nice little social media marketing company that takes payments from advertisers looking to promote articles on Digg and StumbleUpon.  They then in turn pay users of Digg and StumbleUpon to vote for the articles that are to be advertised.

They actually have users vote on multiple articles so that the services targeted can not determine which articles are being promoted for paid reasons.

This is truly a subversion of Digg and StumbleUpon.

That said, I find Digg to be utterly without any merit or value.  I find no useful information on Digg and find even fewer useful conversations there, unless you find value in reading nasty snarky fan boy comments about the glories of Apple and the evil of everything else in the world.

StumbleUpon is a bit different.  I do find a slightly bit larger amount of potential in StumbleUpon, but again that potential is typically only realized by people that 'work' the system professionally, building up cliques of readers and followers, who get nothing for their effort of supporting someone on a pedestal.

The fallacy of social media is that it is socialism first, media second and added value primarily for the people at the top and never those people in the middle or the bottom.

To find benefit in too many social media platforms, you have to essentially get favors for nothing from your friends, readers and followers.

So when a company like Subvert and Profit comes along helping people essentially reward the people in the middle and the bottom with a little fundage, I do not mind the application of capitalism to a socialist system.  I do not see very many spammy topics float through Subvert and Profit.  Typically the articles promoted are actually very good, and the article creators are literally putting their money where there mouth is.  I've never seen spammy topics on goji juice or acne cure alls or one of those nasty survey links or made for affiliate landing pages.

Show Me the Money?

This is where Subvert and Profit is a little weak.  Their growth or maybe their advertisers sales may be a little low to keep up with their network of Subverters.

After 3 months or so, I've seen a bit more than $8 come in.

That's not a lot of money, and I have heard of people making a lot more. 

The issue in the system, actually seems to be that when they send you an assignment, you have to jump on it with inhuman lightening speed, before the job disappears before you have had a chance to do the thing.

More often than not, when I see an assignment in email, when I look on the site seconds later, it is already gone or filled.

Its not a lot of effort at all, so I continue and I usually use my funds to pay for my own advertising through the same system, but that's what I see so far.  I'm looking forward to watching the network continue to grow, but I think they need to lock down the assignments for people for just a little bit more time otherwise people will get too disgruntled.

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