Digg.com – Sponsored Stories?!
Thu, August 6th 2009 at 09:02pm
Digg.com has been one of my daily sites for a long time now, I really like the idea of community submitted stories and the community “Digging” the stories to promote them. This is both good and bad because the community can be full of a bunch of idiots who just keep posting the same photo of a Tiger swimming in a pool, or they can post some undiscovered gem I have never seen before. But good or bad it’s always been about the community.
Digg.com adds Sponsored Stories!
Today for the first time I seen a Sponsored story on Digg. It makes it to the front page with only 4 or 5 votes. This is too much now. We already have to put up with the flash ads popping up on each page and now companies can pay to get their stories on the front page.
It’s not there all the time, it pops up randomly when you visit. But this is not a good sign for the direction Digg is taking. I know they have to make money, but this seems like a line that they should not cross. In my mind it’s like a news paper selling articles to corporations and letting them write the material.
