SubvertandProfit is known for allowing people to buy “diggs’ on the popular digg.com news site. Today they opened up the marketplace so advertisers can buy positive ‘thumb up’ from StumbleUpon for any url of their choice. The first thing you would think of is that the here comes the spam, while that may be a valid concern to some I do not think this will have much if any effect on Stumbleupon and the users. StumbleUpon would of been riddled with spam long ago if it allowed direct URL votes to count into its system.

Here is the screen shot of the basic field that advertisers will use when filling out a request and below are the guidelines direct from Subvert. Its pretty basic, they fund the account and buy stumbles for 1 dollar.

StumbleUpon Guidelines

User

• It is ok to thumbs up stories that you were not assigned with your account. In fact, we encourage you to do so.
• You may have stories to thumbs up even if we don’t email you.

Advertiser

• Please note that in order to avoid detection by StumbleUpon, we spread out votes on your content over the course of several days.
• Please limit the number of votes you buy for a particular URL to 30 per week.
• If you have a site with multiple pages, try to split up the votes between some of the pages. For example, if you run a blog, you could buy votes for both your homepage and individual posts.
• We reserve the right to reject any advertisement!

Most of us who have been doing actual advertising on Stumble (you can buy placement for 5 cents directly from Stumble) have noticed that a direct thumbs up does not drive traffic in the way that one does if it was sent by the Stumble toolbar. This means that if you go directly to a site and thumbs up it the vote doesnt count as much (or any) as it would if it happened naturally through someone stumbling.
What this means is that this attempt to game StumbleUpon does not work and will have almost no impact on the community. There is some talk that if you send a url to a friend then it shows up in their toolbar and if they then thumbs up the site it counts in full. This has not been confirmed yet.

This might work for Digg but StumbleUpon will probably not be affected by this. This battle may have been over before it began.