Would You Pay to Reach The Top of Digg

We all know about the Digg effect, very similar to the Slashdot effect. When something is Dugg, and reaches the front page, a swarm of traffic comes to your website that can crash your servers. A massive amount of people and bots will view your ads and your content like never before. Marketing gold right?

I started the morning by reading an article over at E-Consultancy about why it is a bad idea to pay for a spot on Digg. I didn’t know this but according to Patrick Altoft, the article’s author, there are companies out there that will guarantee you a spot on Digg’s front page for a small fee.

I did some looking around and I found a few sites that promise to get you on Digg for as little as $35 to as much as $150. I was all set to upload my latest masterpiece video of my friends trying to jump a moving car on a tri-cycle when I asked myself what would I be getting if I paid for a spot on Digg.

I would probably get tens of thousands of visitors to my site. My site would probably crash but I would reach people sitting at their desks trying to do anything but work, score! These people would think about me and my tri-cycle for maybe 4 seconds until the went on to the next article. Then my article would get buried because those who control Digg, the users, would realize I payed to get on the front page.

I then started to think what would happen if I earned a spot on Digg’s front page. I would slowly earn exposure, probably have to submit several articles, and actually learn what my targets were after. I would also have to invest a large amount of time and money (money=time) to figure all this out.

What this argument comes down to is time and investments vs speed questionable results. After reading several more articles on how to ‘earn’ a spot on Digg I realized that buying a spot does present a certain value; it is like paying for a press release for the wires. Tons of quick exposures and some lasting traffic if you have quality content.

I am still up in the air about paying for content on Digg. I see the value of ‘flash’ exposure but I also see the value of earning a spot on the front page. What do you think about this? Is paying for a quick exposure worth it on Digg or do you think that the only value can come from earning a spot? Let me know.