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People love to create lists of their favorite things. They create music playlists, wish lists and sports player lists. (For the power of the list, consider David Letterman’s top 10 list, which has become one of the longest running bits in show business.)
If not quite a need, people love to have and share opinions about what they like the best.
The Idea
Create a fun, entertaining website that enabled people to post their top 10 favorites in a wide range of categories.
The site would be aimed at popular culture and invite people to share their 10 favorite movies, foods, songs, stores, toys, cars, football players, actors, bands, authors, books, comedians, animals, vacations, even Seinfeld episodes… there could be many categories. The more categories the site had, the wider its appeal would be. Perhaps the categories could themselves be grouped into broader categories such as entertainment, sports and travel.
Similar to Twitter, the site would enable users to view other people’s favorites. For example, site visitors could view their favorite celebrity’s top 10 lists, or their friend’s lists. Site members could use the site simply by registering and creating a profile. The site could gain hits and popularity by allowing users to link to their Facebook and Twitter pages.
People love to talk about their favorites, and so the site would encourage dialogue with interactive features that would allow commenting, as in blogs and forums. The top 10 format is familiar to most people and provides a good organizational scheme. Perhaps the site could keep an aggregated tally of the most popular things in each category-another fun feature to see how “my†list stacks up against everyone else’s.
Depending on how far the owner wanted to develop the concept, this site could have a very strong social networking aspect. Members might naturally interact with someone else who shared similar interests (as evidenced in matching favorites lists). Would this lead to promotional partnerships with other social networking and relationship sites such as eHarmony and the aforementioned Facebook and Twitter? Quite possibly.
Tapping The Market
This website is all about fun and sharing opinions. Promoting the site could similarly use a fun approach to its marketing messages. Possible marketing tactics include:
– Creating link-sharing partnerships with compatible sites
– Creating an SEO site as well as a Google Adwords campaign
– Submitting reviews to site-sharing websites such as stumbleupon.com
– Developing followers/friends on Twitter and Facebook
– Mentions on entertainment-focused blogs
– Press releases to web- and technology-related media such as cnet.com
The Numbers
The site could be monetized through advertising and partnerships-the categories created would lend themselves to targeted advertising in each category. For example, a top 10 movies category would logically attract a new movie advertisement.
Once the site had reached a critical mass of users, providing anonymous data mining capabilities for other businesses could provide income.
Another idea: add shopping/ecommerce capabilities that would enable people to buy listed items (a movie, a toy, etc.) and which would provide the owner, as an affiliate, a commission on the transaction.
Who Should Start This Biz
The entrepreneur behind the Top 10 List website should have good web development skills, or have sources for such talent, and have good marketing capabilities-which would be essential for developing the partnerships mentioned above.
Why This Is A Powerful New Business Idea
People create lists of favorites all the time and love to share their favorites and their opinions in social situations. A website devoted to top 10 lists in multiple categories could capitalize on this common facet of human behavior. The site would be fun, could be very interactive, link logically to other websites in the social genre and could be monetized.
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