So, are you saying your feelings are hurt cause they thought of it first?

I refreshed the Dallas Observer (My local VVM papers)s blog a few times, there was an Ad for Amex Travel, Microplace, Tic Tac, Livestrong, Forexclub, Partnership for a Drug Free America. Infact, I only saw one locally targeted ad. Since almost all of their ads are for national campaigns I don’t think their advertisers are too concerned about where their readers are located, just that they are seeing the advertisements. While the employees might be submitting the stories to Digg, it is still the Digg users voting them up, I don't see anything wrong about that.

And on the same note, I am a daily reader of SLOG, and I live in Dallas, Texas and I'm sure I am far from the only person that reads the blog outside of your local market.

Erica, I was just about to write this up--wanted to point out that Kohler doesn't accuse VVM of successfully inflating those Digg votes. It takes hundreds of users to get a story up in the listings, and he can't find more than a dozen or so VVM staffers as users.

The stories that reached the top of Digg did so relatively organically. But you do touch on the right issue -- how VVM courts local advertisers with this data, and how that's disingenuous.

@2: I just loaded the Observer as well (hiya!) and it's all ads with Dallas area codes. They are not yet effectively geotargeting, and they haven't since I've moved here.

does the Stranger make of a point of telling locals, Seattle, that tons of their traffic are horn dogs not living in 206 land? And, thus, fewer local consumption dollars ...

Wonder ...

Haha advertisers paying for impressions get what they deserve. They're pretty much just guessing right? They basically have no idea what their money actually buys, so cheating them is almost a mercy.

Sure this is slimey. But Digg is pretty much only this kind of crap. I quitt using Digg a long time ago.

I usually don't go in for the "why is this news" comment on Slog, since it's clearly a blog and not a newspaper, but this isn't that surprising or uncommon. Businesses of all shapes and sizes are doing this all the time on Digg, to varying degrees of success. @5 - 100% agree on advertisers paying for impressions.

I managed the VV web site back in ye Internet olden days, and I'd submit selected stories to various sites, but only when relevant -- e.g. an article on Linux posted to Slashdot.

However, doing that kind of thing as an "organized campaign" to a general-purpose site like Digg is pretty lame. And not clearly identifying yourself as an employee of the paper when doing so is ethically tenuous, at best.

Don't get yourself all verklempt - these papers are all being run into the ground and will be toast before you know it.

pretty much par for the course.

Interesting that the Stranger would make a big deal about the value of the advertising on local VVM sites coming from outside their local market areas. It seems to me that the Stranger's #1 traffic driver must be Savage Love. This column probably gets most of its traffic from the whole USA if not the World, not Seattle. But what is striking is that the ads all around the Savage column seem to be local ads. Boy, how does that really do any good for the local advertiser when the reader is out of town? I read papers from all over the Country and it seems like you guys are doing kinda the same thing as VVM.....

It seems unethical, but it's not surprising. Seems like everybody in online marketing has had this idea before. The truth is, while you can fake actual independent interest to some extent, you'll never match the real thing.