Jason Calacanis thinks so. He is on a crusade to out PR/marketing agencies who he suspects are paying top Digg-ers to recommend clients products. He has called for support in outing these companies and even put up a nominal $100 reward for information offered. Info has started to come in, although nothing has been validated with any confidence and, for the record, the first culprit would appear to be an in-house marketer, not an agency.
The issue here isn't perhaps that agencies would pay for recommendations but the lack of transparency to end users that a recommendation might really be a message from our sponsor.
The power of Digg is not to be underestimated. On a couple of occasions we have had posts recommended on Digg, in each case it put another 25,000 unique visits onto the normal post numbers.
Tags: Digg, Jason Calacanis, ethics