// Internet Duct Tape

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

Posted in Digg, Links, Technology by engtech on November 19th, 2006

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)

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8 Responses to 'spikethevote.com (the anti-digg) goes for sale on ebay'

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  1. raincoaster said, on November 19th, 2006 at

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

  2. engtech said, on November 19th, 2006 at

    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 said, on November 23rd, 2006 at

    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 said, on November 23rd, 2006 at

    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. Digest for November 2006 « //engtech said, on November 29th, 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. [...]

  6. engtech said, on December 8th, 2006 at

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

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

  7. drew said, on December 9th, 2006 at

    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.

  8. engtech said, on December 10th, 2006 at

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

    Still, 470 is kinda low for backlinks on google.