spikethevote.com (the anti-digg) goes for sale on ebay

Social bookmarking sites can generate a lot of traffic for websites. Several services have been created for cheating the system, one of which is spikethevote.com (intended for cheating digg, del.icio.us and netscape). It never seemed to have gotten off the ground though. One week after it was supposed to start it’s “missions” the owner has put it up for sale on Ebay with a starting price of $1000.

Is that too much? I think so. The site has never really been proven and it only has 470 backlinks on Google, page rank of 0, and 60 links from blogs.

But the if you could successful cheat social networking sites regularly, you could easily make that money back and more.

UPDATE: Sold to Jim Messenger for $1,275.

Read more for screenshots of the Ebay sale.

(image from zeropaid)

Previous Coverage

This entry was written by engtech, posted on November 19, 2006 at , filed under Digg, Links, Technology. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

7 Comments

  1. raincoaster
    Posted November 19, 2006 at | Permalink

    Yeah, but does it WORK? I’m way too lazy to actually participate in Digg, del.what.ever. etc.

  2. engtech
    Posted November 19, 2006 at | Permalink

    I have no idea if these vote cheating websites work. They don’t publicize the results :) I doubt spikethevote does otherwise he wouldn’t be selling the site one week after his first public test.

    I have seen the traffic that can come in from digg/delicious/etc, and it can be very good if you get popular on it. Which pretty much means a full time job of trying build up your network on that site, become a top user, etc. So far StumbleUpon is the only one I really like because it has such a lower barrier of entry. It doesn’t take much effort to reach a wide audience there.

  3. raincoaster
    Posted November 23, 2006 at | Permalink

    These kinds of things surely worked for gavilan; just too bad each of his posts was plagiarized. But I’m skeptical about the return on time investment; until WordPress builds this into the templates, it’ll be a total PIA to do. Still, I may try it if I find something original to say. Ever.

  4. engtech
    Posted November 23, 2006 at | Permalink

    Yeah, I don’t bother submitting to Digg usually because it’s pretty much a pain to get people to vote for it unless you can use the javascript widgets.

  5. engtech
    Posted December 08, 2006 at | Permalink

    UPDATE: It was bought by Jim Messenger and now redirects to Digg.

    Story: http://www.famousagents.com/2006/12/07/digg-cheaters-get-caught/

  6. drew
    Posted December 09, 2006 at | Permalink

    engtech, the site was released after the most recent visible page rank update, so it’s of course going to have a visible page rank of 0.

  7. engtech
    Posted December 10, 2006 at | Permalink

    @drew: good point, I forgot about that. :)

    Still, 470 is kinda low for backlinks on google.

One Trackback

  1. By Digest for November 2006 « //engtech on November 29, 2006 at

    [...] One of those sites that were created for cheating social bookmarking is for sale: spikethevote.com (the anti-digg) goes for sale on ebay. Scrybe is a really awesome looking Flash-based online calendar that I’m beta testing: Scrybe Beta Update. [...]