Subvert and Profit, the site which pays social media website users for their votes, has announced it will expand its services to StumbleUpon on July 16th. While some people believed S&P would go down in fiery flames, there have been a couple of interviews with the site’s owner that paint a much different picture.
Expanding to StumbleUpon will most likely prove to be a good move for them since the site has become a major player in the social media market with around 2.7 million users. The pay off for advertisers and content producers, however, will be very different from a campaign on Digg. StumbleUpon traffic is much more steady and spread out compared instead of the all-out traffic burst from Digg and the site also doesn’t generate new links or new RSS subscribers.
Due to these large differences, it seemed prudent to ask the S&P’s owner, Ragnar Danneskjold, to expand on what types of interest he has received from advertisers and how a StumbleUpon campaign might differ from one on Digg.

Yes, I agree that StumbleUpon is a very different animal. StumbleUpon
would seem to be more purely about driving traffic numbers, whereas Digg could also be about link building and getting exposed to other bloggers.
Many advertisers have expressed that they are ready to go as soon as we are.
The best thing about StumbleUpon is that it opens up our service to a much more diverse pool of advertisers. Digg seems to serve a pretty homogeneous crowd, whereas practically every niche imaginable, even porn, has a place on StumbleUpon.

While the possibilities of content type are much more diverse on StumbleUpon, will advertising through S&P actually pay off? If not, it will be important for S&P to either focus its energy on Digg or expand to more similar sites like Netscape and Reddit. Ragnar gave me an idea of where the site might move in the future.

There is definitely another huge target out there. “Social media”
is bigger than story-voting sites.
Also, we don’t even have to stick to social media. Subvert and Profit is, fundamentally, a big crowdsourcing market. We could expand to any number of markets. We could compete with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or even something like PayPerPost.

Regardless of the ethics of a site like Subvert and Profit, it certainly opens the doors to a different type of market for advertisers. Even though this could be bad news for social media, it allows services like Digg and StumbleUpon to work through possible holes in their ranking processes making the services better for everyone.