I recently learned about DotNetKicks due to a referral in my referrer logs. It is essentially a Digg knockoff, but tightly focused on the .NET community, which makes it a nice complement to Digg.
Recently, security expert Bruce Shneier wrote a piece on how security can be improved by aligning interest with capability. One example he gives is how some retail stores promise refunds if you don’t get a receipt. This keeps the employee working the register honest by aligning the store owner’s security interest with the interests of the customers. The owner is effectively hiring the customers to keep employees honest.
In a similar manner, DotNetKicks has done the same thing to promote its own growth. If you have an AdSense account, you can submit your AdSense ID and earn 50% of the advertisement revenue on the site for all stories that you submit. This aligns story submitters' interests with DotNetKicks’ interest and should go along way to ensure that more stories are submitted.
Of course, the signal to noise ratio of submitted stories may go down as a result, but that is hardly a concern because only the stories that the community deem interesting, via the voting system, percolate to the front page and have any chance of really generating advertising revenue. The question I have is what is the incentive to users to kick stories apart from the community benefits?