Calacanis offers to buy out digg users
Netscape boss Jason Calacanis has offered to essentially buy out the top users on Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit for $1000 per month:
"We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline)."
This offer is open to about a dozen people initially. You've got to hand it to Calacanis, he is a very savvy businessman and this offer will really stir the 'community news' pot. The cynic in me says he's decided to do some 'offensive defence', to try and put the New Netscape troubles behind him. And money talks.
But put this into context of my post yesterday about Digg's stats, where I noted that a select group of digg users are highly influential, and it makes perfect business sense. Among the top diggers are people who have submitted over 1000 stories to digg, with a 25-40% success rate in getting those submissions to the digg homepage! If you do some back-of-the-envelope calculations, you quickly see that paying those top diggers $1000 per month is a pittence for what Netscape will reap - hundreds of thousands of extra pageviews per month, maybe millions. This will come from increased quantity of stories, as well as the 'quality' that Jason talks about at length in his post (unfortunately quantity still rules on the Web though).
Not to mention the fact that those ex-digg users will bring across probably a good proportion of their friends to the Netscape system, which will put a huge dent in digg's page views too.
The big question though is: what is the price of a top digg user? Everybody has a price. How many of those top digg users will accept $1000 per month? It'll be very interesting to find out... oh and although Jason Calacanis mentions Flickr, MySpace, etc - it's pretty obvious who he really wants! BloodJunkie, gwjc, digitalgopher, dirtyfratboy (some top digg users) - what's your price?
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Very interesting.
I'd also wonder how long before individual online marketers make offers to the top-rated diggers to post their stories. Often, the top diggers get stories on the front page, simply because they have a large network of "friends" that monitor their diggs.
That turns out to be about $6.67 per story at 150 stories a month submitted and even less as the stories submitted go over 150 which they will. For the time it takes to submit a story that is decent pay and this obviously shows he has no idea what he is doing. Instead of creating a great site like he should he is focusing on other strategies.
Of course they'd go over to Netscape... why wouldn't they?
They submit those stories anyway, why not get paid for it? I would go in a heartbeat, sure the money isn't fantastic but $12,000 a year is nothing to sneeze at.
So what's stoping them from taking the offer, adding 150 stories to Netscape, and adding the rest of those 250-400 stories to Digg? Or even just submitt those 150 stories both to Digg and Netscape at the same time?
PreZ, look at it another way: this is essentially another way for Netscape to 'buy' page views. At $1k per month for 150+ stories from an influential - that's a bargain as far as I'm concerned.
B0rge, there would certainly be some kind of non-competing clause - as there is for weblogsinc bloggers (and any other network blogger).
Those users could easily do atleast 150 in their free time alone, so that's 12K a year in their pocket. Assuming that is, that they are surviving on their current incomes. I'd do it if I was offered. Ofcourse, I'd probably ask for 1.2K a month, just to be cheeky.
Understand this as well...
He is offering to pay these people considerably more than what he offers starting bloggers at Weblogs Inc. And for what exactly? Just social bookmarking rights?
Bloggers at WIN are not only required to find posts similar to top digg stories, but have to research it, summarize it, follow it up, write it, format it AND link it...
So we're talking a fraction of the work that his own bloggers do for a lot more money.
Food for thought.
The oversight on Calcanis's part is what makes Digg work: it's a social thing. If you were getting paid to bar-hop, how long before it just becomes a job? Digg is fun, and for the top posters I suspect it also strokes their ego. Can you put a $ figure on that if you are now pimping yourself?
If some of these guys take the carrot, I suspect most of them will quickly burn out on it or will slowly burn out while the quality of their bookmarks steadily declines. This is the essence of the 'net were talking about. After you pay people to gossip for so long, it just becomes noise.
Get a contract before you do ANY work for someone like Calacanis. Just sayin.
I stopped going to digg (and fark) because of their censorship of posts they dont like or politically agree with. And Im not talking about user censorship, Im talking about entire posts being deleted in a most draconian manner.
So, anything that can draw users away from digg and on to netscape (where they dont censor - at least not so far) is a good thing.
The cynic in me says he's decided to do some 'offensive defence', to try and put the New Netscape troubles behind him. And money talks.
You know, I totally agreed with that line the first time I read it, but on a second thought the mutterings of most, if not all of the personal development books I've looked at and listened to point out the same thing came back to me - Successful business people have failures. Making a success of a venture isn't about not having failures, but how you learn from them and keep moving forward, and that's what's happening here.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this, sites like digg make their money from adsense and the like, and effectively are just profiting of a community they happen to provide a home to, so why shouldn't a community push some of that money back to the people who are actually creating the content?
Sure, people might then not be as objective about what they post, they could be "bought" but at the same time I think its pretty naive to think that PR and Marketing firms aren't already "posing" as various identities on the net and pushing their own products in some way.
I think the key is to be open about it, so people can see how is "Paid for" and draw their own conclusions on an informed level.
>>Ofcourse, I'd probably ask for 1.2K a month, just to be cheeky.
If your one of the top folks that Jason wants to hire... make a counter offer. If you know you can produce, and you can convince Jason you can produce, then I think asking for more is a smart move.
It is going to take a lot more than $1000/month to get me to jump ship on digg. I honestly don’t know that you could put a price on it. The people that use digg are where the real value is for me.
Poor old Netscape users. Not only did they get digg without wanting to, now they also will get flooded with 3000+ articles each month which mostly won't make any sense (but probably won't resonate anyway) within their community.
The value is in the reader base. It's harder to buy the clicks from readers, than to cherry pick the top posters with cash. The cash won't buy a sense of community for a company like Netscape. I can understand the appeal of cash, but stroke to the ego in a comfortable, community environment can be worth a great deal more (depending on your motives for joining that community).
I wonder how long it will take before the rosey smell of cash for doing what diggers do and enjoy is diminished by the thorny terms of contract.
The Bubble is Back Baby!
Calacanis is wasting his money. He obviously has not looked enough into digg to realize why the top people at digg stay at the top like in any "democratic" type system. Buddyclub type features in digg, mainly the ability to RSS people's stories favor top posters. Digg's social aspects are what have made this group. They often help out eachother to get stories dugg to the front page, take a look at who the first diggers are on most of their stories, eachother. The best content was on digg for a time but even in v3.0 they have not managed to change their app to be able to manage the number of users they're seeing, and there are simple ways to do it. The quality of digg's content is also subject to this new mob rule/we're at the top system not to mention, most of what the top users do is just cheaply spend their days re-posting links from simlilar sites like reddit, or they try to be the first to post a new CNet story when it's out, cmon do we really need to make digg into the VH1 of the web?
LOLing at today's reddit logo
Good luck, Jason.
As an early Digg user I concur, Bloodjunkies comment is spot on. It' about the community and the intelligence and quality of the user! The expansion of Digg may have degraded that a bit, But the core is still there. Jason wont build that overnight just as Digg didnt. Something to keep in mind no matter how much money he wants to throw at it.
I strongly disagree with this move by the Netscape crew. It basically tells the community that Netscape's offering is so bad that they have to pay people to make sure it is a success. Why can't they battle on features and quality instead of bribes. I am a bit disappointed. Good luck, Jason.