Get paid for your links

Social bookmarking is the hot new trend, but blog entrepreneur Jason Calacanis has come up with an old school way of getting links--pay people to do the work.

Calacanis, who now works for AOL and is in charge of the newly redesigned Netscape site, is offering top linkers at bookmarking sites like Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and Digg compensation for their links.

"We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year," he wrote on his blog.

Blog community response:

"Netscape has a massively larger audience than Digg, but has absolutey failed to impact Digg growth at all. AOL placed a big bet on this product, and I imagine they want to see fast results. They aren't getting those results. Jason's post is a sign of desperation more than anything."
--TechCrunch

"Will he be able to cripple his competitors by luring their most religious users and contributors away for $12,000 per year? I doubt it. But if a price war was to break out over the elite of the Web 2.0 community, who's got deeper pockets than Calacanis?"
--Tech Effect

"It has been well documented that Netscape users don't like the new Digg-like Netscape. Jason Calacanis' solution--hire away Digg's power users, who drive 90% of Digg's value. But even if these power users are for sale (an interesting question), it still wouldn't help Netscape woo back its original user base of average people."
--Publishing 2.0