There are thousands of users actively submitting and bookmarking stories across popular social bookmarking tools like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit and if properly submitted, these stories can top the popular charts and drive huge site traffic to suggested sites and blogs. But since these services are free, most of these top geeky users participate actively for fun, recognition and of course get to search and promote the top web content.
Jason Calcanis of Weblogs Inc blogging network says that Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and Digg were all driven by a small number of highly-active users who enjoyed sharing the links they found and that they got satisfaction out of being an “expert” or “leader” in their communities. And Calcanis is offering a deal to top users of services like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit which can help them earn $1000 per month.
“I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:
We will pay you $1,000 a month for your “social bookmarking” rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we’ll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that–a baseline).Now, this offer is going to get a big response I know, so we’re going to have to limit to a dozen or so folks. However, I’m absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we’re the first folks to pay them that is fine with me–we will take the risk and the arrows from the folks who think we’re corrupting the community process (is there anyone out there who thinks this any more?!).
We’re gonna identify this people in our system as “Netscape Navigators,” and they will work with our full-time “Netscape Anchors” to build a community.”
Just in case you are wondering where does Netscape come in all this? Well Jason is associated with Netscape.com which many say is relaunched as a Digg-clone and this a way to switch top users away from other competing bookmarking sites to Netscape by paying them.
Now that is an offer these top users can look out for. But will this monetary offer take the fun out of submitting stories purely for sharing with others…