What’s it worth to you to get your content on the front page of reddit? That may no longer be a rhetorical question because the social news website today launched a beta test in which people can pay for a sponsored link on reddit’s home page.

TechCrunch’s MG Siegler reports:

As long as you’re willing to pay the minimum of $20 a day, Reddit will enter you into a pool with everyone else willing to pay to determine how much face time you’ll get on the homepage. For example, if the total bids for the day equal $200, and you bid the minimum $20, you’ll get 10% of the day in this ad slot. It seems very likely that the daily bids are going to be quite a bit more than that, so $20 probably isn’t going to buy you much, but still, it will get you something.

More like next to nothing, if you want to be realistic about it. Say the total bids for the day come to $20,000 and you, a modest blogger, decide to go in for $20 so you can expose your brilliance to the world. You’d be buying 1/1000th of the day’s share of the front-page link, which comes to 1.44 minutes. How many page views will you get from that, especially if you’re stuck in the coveted 4 a.m. ET time slot?

Two other limitations to reddit’s beta test, as Siegler notes: 1) It’s a closed beta, meaning you have to be accepted into the program, and 2) you can’t target subreddits (WTF, entertainment, etc.), though that option eventually is expected to be offered.

Clearly it’s too soon to tell what kind of revenue reddit will get from paid front-page links — assuming the program gets out of beta — but if this takes off, the cost of getting onto the front for any meaningful amount of time will go up. And that’s going to exclude all but the most deep-pocketed players — namely sites with advertising budgets. I’m down-voting this.