This is Going to Work. Wanna Bet?
March 26th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’m a little honked off. When I was working at Technology Review, we had a low-end predictive market section on the site. At the time, I was enamored with it, but we didn’t have the resources to fully commit to it. I was in the midst of a complete business plan and technical overhaul, which took more time than I had in a day.
By the time our plan had been submitted and rubber-stamped, we had to make a decision: keep the predictive market around and try to build it or dump it and use the money to focus on our core product building.
I made the call to kill the market, which was the right decision at the time. But I knew it was going to come back to haunt me because predictive markets are everything the Web does well.
PaidContent has a post about Predictify’s $4.3 million in venture funding, which got me thinking about newspapers.
The most obvious place for predictive markets are with news organizations. It’s so simple to build an application that enables people to user your content (and other content, if you set it up right) to research their bets. Then simply deploy a user registration area along with the basic Rules of Community Building and get out of the way.
Well, not exactly get out of the way. You’ll need a community manager to build, maintain and administer the site; however, there are multiple revenue streams available: advertising, sponsorships, live events and even paid tournaments, just to name a few.
You’re also giving your most fanatical readers the opportunity to take ownership over a section of your site. If you play your cards right, you can both encourage community building on a grassroots level and develop story ideas based upon data gathered from the predictive markets.
It’s not so dissimilar from the idea of attaching social networking and MeetUp functionalities to the editorial pages.
