Gaming Link Sites: Marketing 2.0

With the signal-to-noise ratio at an all-time high for user-created content, it becomes more and more difficult to get your voice out there. Impressions equal ad dollars for many sites, and it's a constant struggle to compete.

As a result, people are looking for any way possible to get their message out there, and that includes a "new" way of marketing, including gaming sites for incoming links.

There are tons of sites that people attempt to game, some with more success than others. Bokardo noted that even Gabe Rivera, creator of Techmeme, acknowledges that some gaming is bound to take place on any site with a ratings hierarchy, some with more transparency than others. The problem with a site like Digg is that not only does it seem to be almost designed to be gamed, but also the opposite, with bands of people who seek to bury articles.

I thought we'd really talked the whole social bookmarking culture to death until I saw a piece on VentureBeat about Collactive, a new service that allows you to rally all your friends to Digg an article or vote a video on YouTube.

The comments on VentureBeat claim it's not spamming a rating site, but if it isn't, what else is it? What is the worth of ratings when they are upped by herding? Or circles of people who will always up-rate or Digg articles from the same authors? Even Collactive itself is in on the action, showing the most popular and most recent pieces members have sent an "APB" for.

Internet marketers have created eBooks on everything from using services like Twitter to "communicate with potential customers" to using MySpace and MyBlogLog to push yourself out there, not calling it spam, but that's pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia isn't immune, and at least one blog media site was banned for its writers using the site to generate more incoming links by referencing their own sites in Wikipedia articles.

New media has created new marketing methods, which in turn seem to be creating new services to use any new technology for self-promotion.