Blogstakes

Blogstakes aims to merge the weblog phenomenon with viral marketing. The basic premise is that Blogstakes gives stuff away in sweepstakes, and bloggers are incentivized to link to the contests because Blogstakes will award the same prize to both the randomly drawn winner and the referring blog. The web copy optimistically promises, "So if the prize is a truck, then the winning entry gets a truck, and the blog that sent them gets a truck too." I spoke with Mr. Blogstakes, aka Brian Alvey — see details below.

So far Blogstakes is not giving away a truck. They're giving away a year's worth of BrowserCam, a service that shows web developers how their site looks in a wide range of browser platforms, and Clip-n-Seal, a fastener to seal plastic bags airtight.

In fact, Alvey told me, the whole idea for Blogstakes came about when the founder of Clip-n-Seal, a friend of a friend of Alvey's, asked him for ideas to market that site. After thinking about it for a week, Alvey wrote him an email reply suggesting "Why don't you try a sweepstakes." One thing lead to another, and Blogstakes was born.

Alvey is an industrious fellow, with a background designing the first TVGuide site and working as a key technologist at BusinessWeek.com, as well as building web applications for the likes of Intel, J.D. Edwards, Deloitte & Touche and The McGraw-Hill Companies. He's also the host of Meet the Makers, a series of talk-show style seminars with high-flying guest web personalities.

As far as he's concerned Blogstakes is "a social experiment," so he's taken a deliberately low-key approach to promoting it, but it's already got blogosphere buzz written all over it (so much so that I've already recommended one of my clients become a sponsor). The site gives sponsors great advertising exposure, featuring a full-page pitch for them above their respective contest entry forms, and at this early stage in the venture, the period for the sweepstakes is up to a month or longer, giving lots of eyeball time for the advertisers.

Since the site itself is kind of a blog and its model is very much in the opt-in spirit of blogging, I don't see bloggers getting annoyed with it, especially since they have a change to win themselves. And the whole model of the site, rewarding the blogs that promote the contests, is made perfectly clear to any site visitor, so I don't see it raising objections from blog purists. "I am not interested in being the next Raging Cow," Alvey said. I thnk he's achieved a good way to involve "blog outsiders" in the whole blog phenomenon without breaching good blogging etiquette.

While the site is still in a kind of public beta experiment phase, Alvey says contest applicants are already signing up rapidly and a few marketers have been in touch with him as well, including "a major movie studio." List pricing for participating as a sponsor is a $500 fee to Blogstakes, plus the donation of two prizes. Alvey uses his considerable experience building online database systems to take care of all the tracking for participating blogs, and he has experience running sweepstakes so he knows how to stay on the right side of legal issues in that regard, he says.

Whether this turns out to be merely a blip on Daypop or a sustainable business model remains to be seen, but either way, I like how the idea validates the blog marketing opportunity.