As promised last week, The Deets' Ed Kohler delivers a virtual rectal probe of City Pages' web-traffic strategy.

"This is the story about a girl that’s actually a dude who’s brought in 3.8 - 19.4 million visitors* to Village Voice Media websites by gaming Digg," Kohler begins.

From that saucy lead, Kohler describes how the social media aggregator has been manipulated by "Philostrato," a VVM employee in Houston — the dude posing as a girl — with help from "IvanB." (VVM owns City Pages and the nation's biggest alt-weekly network.) It's a fascinating case study of exactly how one media company's web strategy plays out.

Contrasting the powerful "Ivanb" to City Pages web editor Jen Boyles ("jbizzy"), Kohler writes:

Digg takes a lot of variables into consideration when weighing a vote (digg) on their system. If someone only Diggs their own website’s stories, their votes will begin to carry less weight. It’s important to diversify your Diggs if you want your occasional self-diggs to carry weight. For example, Ivanb has dugg over 60,000 stories on Digg and maintains an almost 60:1 ratio between posts he diggs to posts he submits. Jbizzy, on the other hand, is running around 8:1 (and almost all of her Diggs are for other VVM properties).

His bottom-line point, as it was last week, is that such web hits are cheap, don't serve local advertisers, and don't really improve local coverage.

To be fair, City Pages publisher Mark Bartel replied to Kohler's previous post, noting that Digg accounts for 8 percent of its recent traffic and 1 to 10 percent in a given month. Like MinnPost, Bartel says City Pages will geotarget soon, letting local advertisers pay for local eyeballs while national hits find national sponsors.

On that level, the incremental revenue from national hits can help sustain a local operation — assuming the tail doesn't start wagging the dog. Bartel also says 78 percent of City Pages' web traffic is from the Twin Cities metro area.

What about MinnPost's tactics?

We're all about pushing our content to helpful places — I Twitter every Braublog post and regularly send stuff to James Romenesko's media site. We also submit stories to Digg, Stumbleupon and others.

What we don't do is Digg tens of thousands of other items to synthesize power and hype our own stuff. As our operations director Karl Pearson-Cater notes, we're more like Jen Boyles than "IvanB" or "Philostrato."

We basically put stuff out there and hope actual readers promote it. I don't know if that's excessively passive, but it feels right.