First there was PayPerPost. Then ReviewMe.

Just this morning Jim Kukral blogged on ReveNews about Agloco, which “pays you to surf.”

Now, we have Pay Per Digg.

Where Digg Submitters Pay for Digg Users to Promote their Stories.
And, Where Digg Users Make Easy Money.

Users are paid $0.50 for every 3 stories they digg. You can also submit a story to be amped by paying $20 plus $1 per desired digg. The value of a digg has certainly fallen off over the past year, so the market forces alone should be able to clean up this type of less-than-ethical gaming.

Considering market forces as a primary reason for this type of scheme, it is logical to see where the monetary drive to experiment with valuation platforms such as this come from. However, those same economic forces which put value on actions such as diggs also places the operator of these sites in a continual struggle to keep up with the micro-economic structures of supply and demand in a commodity style fluid market. That’s too much for most to accomplish, so I see the market driving this out of business quickly. However, the gaming of Digg will, of course, continue.

These same market forces extend to Agloco, ReviewMe, PayPerPost and the host of other new platforms allowing users to assign a certain value to actions they were already committing (surfing, blogging, clicking). In order to keep up with the market valuations of the actions needed for payout, and values of intangibles such as attention, user experience, ethics, these platforms must have a firm hold on a good deal of data. I suspect most do not and beyond the ethical implications of getting paid to post or surf or digg, the market will drive them into an escalating situation of irrelevance to the individual user.

See why we need to kill links to help affiliate marketing survive as a brand?