Did Village Voice Media Game Digg?

Many of us have long assumed that there are groups of dedicated users who game Digg to push their content to the top of the popular social bookmarking site. It’s valuable real estate that can send a surge of traffic to an otherwise obscure source, generating advertising revenue in the process, and where there’s easy money to be made, there are hackers ready to play.

It is also well-known that the good folks at Digg do their best to thwart these efforts. But in the end, such manipulation simply comes with the territory.

Rarely, however, has a media company been caught red-handed as was Village Voice Media’s CityPages.com this week. Some nice investigative work by Ed Kohler at The Deets reveals that right around the time CityPages web editor Jen Broyles joined Digg, evidence started mounting that suggested Village Voice was using staffers from the company’s nationwide network of alt-weekly sites to promote one of its blogs, The Blotter, on Digg.

Kohler estimates that the Digg campaign has driven millions of visits to the blog, although the range of his estimate — 3.8 to 19.4 million — is too broad to be able to judge the actual scale of the effort.

Nevertheless, his column describing how he investigated this case is worth reading in its entirety as a textbook example of how to use the web to do investigative reporting. As of publication time, there has been no response from the Village Voice or Jen Broyles.