There is a big stink going on right not because Jason Calacanis of Netscape is offering to pay top submitters at competing social networking sites.
Kent Newsome says that he thinks “the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape … is nutty” but concedes that Jason has made a lot of money doing seemingly crazy before.
The last time I visited Netscape I noticed that they monetize their site with ads. That means they are hoping to get more people to click the ads and the best way to do that is to get more eyeballs on the site.
If Jason really can attract some of those top submitters (and for $1000 a month, he will), then he will have managed to attract people to his site that know how to find articles that attract attention and probably improve the content of the site.
More importantly, he will have attracted a strong group of mentors who can help lead the newbies into the land of social bookmarking. One of the changes Netscape recently made included letting users vote on articles and having the most popular articles get the best real estate space on the home page. A lot of the current users of Netscape don’t really understand how to thrive in this kind of system which would explain the strong backlash to the changes from the existing users.
The new power users for hire might manage to excite the everyday users at Netscape and attract new eyeballs, I mean users. People online like to participate and vote for things once they realize that is what they are supposed to do. 12 of those power users will cost Netscape about $144,000 a year. Can Netscape really make $144,000 a year in ad revenue just by having 12 good submitters on their payroll?
Maybe Jason is nutty. But, Jason is looking at the bigger picture. He is not trying to beat down digg. He’s just trying to improve Netscape. Digg will continue to thrive. People will step up to fill in the spots of the people that leave for Netscape. Jason said, “It really isn’t about Netscape vs. DIGG… in reality the battle is ’social news vs. top-down news.’”
He’s just trying to position Netscape to get in a position to be one of the leaders in social news while there is still time. A couple years ago, he might look like a nutty rich man, again.
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