Is the Digg Bar Unethical?

Digg is an online democracy for news, as its users vote of news articles they deem worthy enough to be viewed on the front page of Digg. Recently it seems to increase there own page view count and keep their visitors on Digg they released what is now known as the Digg bar.

When you click on any link on Digg and brought to a new site to see the article you are actually in essence loading the website inside of Digg. Initially when the Digg Bar came out it created much chatter on the Internet on if it was ethical to hijack another website and display a bar at the top of with the Digg logo on it.

The big debate about the Digg Bar was all about traffic hijacking. The number one way for websites to make money is through advertisements on their pages which are a result of traffic traffic, the number of visitor a website gets.

Eventually it was settled that Digg was not exactly hijacking revenue away from the websites that loaded with the Digg Bar because the websites adds were still loading and thus still counting visitors even though the page loaded with the Digg Bar on top and was also given a new short digg url.

Since the Digg Bar is not hurting websites revenue it is ethical, since the website owners are not suffering in loss of traffic or income. Also as a user on Digg you have the option of turning off the Digg Bar in your settings so that when you click on the link you are brought to the actual site and do not see the Digg bar.

Another reason why the Digg bar is ethical is because Digg give website owners the choice to disable the Digg Bar with a simple line of code they can insert onto there website which will disable the Digg Bar. So if a visitor to Digg clicks on a link on Digg and goes to your website and you have the Digg bar disable code then the Digg Bar will not load.

The Digg Bar is not only ethical but also convenient for Digg users. It makes it easy to read a website and Digg it after reading it and deciding it is worthy of your Digg. This eliminates the hassle of after going to a website to read it and then trying to find it back on Digg to Digg it up. Making it easier to Digg a website like this will actually help a website owner because more Diggs means more traffic from Digg, meaning more money from advertisements.

As a result the Digg Bar is not an unethical use of the Internet since it is not hijacking traffic or stealing advertising revenue from website owners. Also since the Digg Bar can be easily disabled by website owners, it is not violating any of their rights.