Subverting Digg for Fun and Profit

The Web has its share of do-wrongers, but every now and then a company comes along and lowers the bar so much that one can only conclude Mephistopheles himself must be on the advisory board. Such is the case with Subvert and Profit, which runs a social media marketing system that works by… well, I’ll just let the firm speak for itself:

Subvert and Profit runs an ever-expanding black market for votes on social media sites. We are simultaneously the easiest way to make money online and the cheapest form of advertising in the web 2.0 sphere. We are the crowdhackers, and we are very good at what we do.

Now I know I’m late on this. Several tech bloggers commented on this one back in April, at which time the service was geared exclusively toward Digg. But it’s interesting and disturbing to note that S&P is still going strong (It claims 1 million servants on Digg. ) and has now expanded its social media gaming scheme to StumbleUpon, where it boasts 4.1 million flying monkeys ready to popularize crappy marketing content. Additionally, as of November it’s added an overseas operation in Poland, “with crowdsourcing across the time zones to stoke your site traffic!”

I’d call it black marketing, but executives have already embraced that title.