In Jason Calacanis’ business world I guess when you can’t beat them, you try to copy them, and when you still can’t beat them, you try to siphon the most active content producers promoters from them:

Now, this offer is going to get a big response I know, so we’re going to have to limit to a dozen or so folks. However, I’m absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we’re the first folks to pay them that is fine with me–we will take the risk and the arrows from the folks who think we’re corrupting the community process (is there anyone out there who thinks this any more?!).

Don’t think I’m going out on a limb saying some of the top users of Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace and Reddit will go for the deal Calacanis is offering which is $1,000/month for a minimum of 150 stories a month (3 stories a day). $12,000 per year minimum for what, 30+ minutes work each day? That’s not a bad return. At a dozen people he’s committing to well over a million dollars $150,000 a year (thanks Jeremy, doh!) to buy talent to compete.

It will be interesting to see what the response from Digg management will be if some of their best users will take the money. I’ve noticed since they switched to v2.0 a lot more videos are being promoted to the front page. Haven’t seen as much of the other type news/stories, but definitely an increase in links to videos (or blogs with videos).

Why give any third party site (so much of) your time for free?
In my years on the web, I’ve yet to get involved with one third party site where I’ve given a significant amount of my time creating and sharing content for free that turned out to be a mutually beneficial deal. Over time this has caused me to be more reluctant to share large amounts of created content at third party sites without a mutually benefit deal in place. It doesn’t have to be dollars, it could be splitting the ad revenue or traffic back to our sites. What does Digg give us for submitting articles? Nothing except ego stroking if the story/link is promoted to the front page. If somebody else submits something from one of your sites or you submit your own stuff (which seems to be a frowned upon practice) than the payoff is a significant amount of traffic to your site.

Many times these sites give you no way to take back when you’ve shared with them (why no export function?) — or make it very difficult to do so as Thomas Hawk found out a month or so ago when he wanted to take all his Flickr tagged pictures with him. I agree that perhaps the most important function is export/import in any site where we spend our time, especially if it is derived from our ‘free’ time.

From a popularity perspective, being a star on a highly trafficked third party site can be earned with your time. It’s harder to create success on your own sites because you have to build the traffic first (something that people usually give up on before they succeed). It’s a good part of the reason that blog networks were born and I’m sure we’ll see print newspapers entering the game eventually too. Convince the talent that hey, we’ve got more traffic than you, so come on over.

However, from a longevity and control perspective on the web the best place to share content you create is on servers and sites you pay for yourself. This provides the maximum amount of control over whether the content stays published, server uptime and connectivity, in what forms, and what websites. This doesn’t mean you won’t be plagiarized. This doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t share content with third party sites, but what will happen if/when someday Digg, Flickr, Reddit, etc goes out of business? Yeah, I know, far-fetched. Let’s revisit this in five years. If that does happen then what happens to all the time spent submitting articles and posts? What happens to your prized top 100 rankings at these defunct sites? Stars can burn out literally overnight when their vehicle is gone.

Fortunately in this wild and wonderful web you can own the vehicle and can keep it running as long as you want (or at least can afford, anyway). This value is priceless and something no third party publisher can ever give you.

No, thank you. Guess I’m primarily sticking to self-publishing on the web. This means I probably won’t make the top 100 users list of any third party site (for any length of time, anyway) but I know the bulk of material I’m producing will be available for many, many years to come. I do this to share my content with people who feel passionate about it (like or dislike) and in a place where I cannot completely guarantee — there are no guarantees in life except death and taxes — but can almost guarantee will still be here in 5, 10 and even 20 years from now. And as more community surrounds the projects my company is involved with I will continue to explore ways to let the community take the content with them. It’s my #1 frustration with third party sites: that the content we create there isn’t easy enough to export and publish on our own sites.

Again, none of this is saying or suggesting that people shouldn’t get involved with third party sites, I’m just sharing, as I always do, my own perspective here. Simply put, I think people should keep the time spent at third party sites in perspective. It’s more than the age old, do you want to work for somebody else or work for yourself?

I don’t go to sites like digg, Flickr, etc to work. I come to our own sites for that. When I contribute to those type third party sites I do it more out of love and a sense of giving back to and sharing with the community and sometimes for additional exposure. I suspect many other self-publishers do the same with perhaps more emphasis on the additional exposure part. Those who are submitting 150+ stories to digg are spending perhaps too much free time if none of that love is coming back to their own sites (I’m guessing it is in at least some of those cases but I haven’t studied the top site contributers). It’s good to see somebody offer these people compensation and trying to make it a mutually beneficial deal.

Calacanis is definitely brazen and his style kind of reminds me of the Tasmanian Devil. This is a smart play because he clearly wants to be the content king. He wisely knows that quality rules at the end of the day and after the launch hype died, Netscape wasn’t attracting enough of the people that make sites like Digg attractive and thus not enough quality. Lately he’s been fighting off a swarm of angry netscape.com users who didn’t like the change to the digg-type format. And what about AOL senior management? They have to be peeing their pants with glee over the fact that at least somebody is talking about Netscape Navigator again. Not the browser, but the term.

[Humorous aside: who wants to be asked some of what they do for a living and respond: “I’m a Netscape Navigator.”]

Calacanis is no fool. This is a disruptive play. And this what Netscape needs if it is to ever be a significant player with its new digg-type format. I said it before, they have the traffic. And they have the dollars to throw around. As long as they have those two things, this is a long way from over.

Good luck to all those who take this offer.

Update 8:13am PST: Just after publishing this it occured to me that if too many people want to become content promoters instead of content producers/creators there will be a greater need for more quality content. This is positive for those of us who spend the bulk of our time creating things. Whether it is software, words or whatever. Bring on the Don King diggers and navigators.

• One week of paint on new Netscape beta, Digg still the big story
• Slashdot Firehose brings readers into story selection process a la digg
• Compare your Digg stats to others
• Calacanis plays limp personal attack card against Kevin Rose
• Digg 3 checkmates Netscape?
• AOL loses Calacanis: You’ve Got Bail