I submitted a story to digg about global banking which went hot, which I didn’t expect as there were no pictures of Megan Fox or explosions. But it got a front page no problem, which raises the question, do certain sites on digg get an artificial bump to the front page?
But lets leave aside the fact that digg loves the multi million dollar publishing companies whilst it loves to dump on little Jonny’s blog about the new AJAX/PHP trick. We might come back to that later.
So when I submitted the FT.com you could read the story, when you go to it now it gives a snippet and asks you to register for free.
Here is the url btw,
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/72bf1538-5c35-11de-aea3-00144feabdc0,Authorised=false.html?_i_location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcms%2Fs%2F0%2F72bf1538-5c35-11de-aea3-00144feabdc0.html%3Fnclick_check%3D1&_i_referer=http%3A%2F%2Fdigg.com%2Fd1uGtS&nclick_check=1
Oh look, it’s throwing up digg.com as the referer. My ADD kicked in before I could decode the url, if anyone wants to show off in the comments, go for it.
So, why is this bad?
It makes me think twice about submitting the FT to any social bookmarking site and I don’t think it motivated other diggers to submit in future.
What would I say to the FT.com if they hired me as a consultant?
If you know the traffic is coming from digg, set it up so that they do not have to register. Why? Diggers are probably not going to register anyway and make link to that page. Hit all other traffic with the subscription page.
Publishers should not be giving stuff away for free unless they get something from it, so FT is doing the right thing with the sub page, but in the wrong way. It would benefit more by letting diggers access it’s content than it would get from what I presume is a teeny tiny amount of subscribers it gets from a digg front page.
Just a teeny tiny tweak would increase their bottom line, c’mon guys it’s not like this is rocket science.