Awhile back when Digg was first getting popular, I figured it wasn’t long before someone would come in and try to pollute the system. Apparently that is happening. While occasionally I do submit my own stories to digg, as it is a good tool for shameless self-promotion, it is unfortunate people are taking such measures as paying people to digg their stories. Of course as with any popular healthy system, it’s gonna attract sharks.

More specifically, the cnet article gives out some numbers:

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.

I would be curious to see how acurate these figures are. It seems strange that somebody could manipulate digg to this effect.

Read the whole article here.

Popularity: 13% [?]