Desperate Students

An interesting play on Michael's DesperateForMoney.com idea is to focus specifically on students.

Desperate adults can be creepy. And the site could quickly devolve into something very lewd.
Students, on the other hand, are often desperate for money. Not the huge, depressing, multi-thousand dollar mortgage payments that an adult might need, but a much more lighter $100 for plane fair, or $50 to buy a new DVD player or something. Also, they are easy to screen for, as facebook.com demonstrated, because you can simply require that they have a valid .edu e-mail address. Finally, students are very comfortable with web technology, and will happily web surf for hours in search of entertaining content -- the best being real content about real students doing real outrageous things.

Accordingly, we could imagine: BrokeStudent.com or DesperateStudent.com or PoorUndergrad.com, etc. You have to be a student to post pleas or reply to pleas, but anyone can browse. If you need money, you post a plea, which consists of a photo, what school you attend, your sob story, and what you are willing to do in exchange for this money. Here the creativity of the audience, as Michael points out, will lead to the entertainment value, as students outdo each other to come up with more outlandish proposals. On one end of the spectrum there could be boring stuff, like offers to tutor or do your homework or clean your dorm room, on the other end of the spectrum there could be offers to eat two dozen hamburgers, or streak the library, or panty-raid a sorority or whatever. And, of course, this brings more attention, as other students want to see what their idiot peers are offering to do. The transactions can be controlled by the individuals. Like craigslist, most would probably happen in person between two people at the same (or nearby) schools, so we wouldn't have to worry about building a payment system or getting involved in those complications.

Instead, there is money to be made first by advertising. Start with Google AdWords so that you can get an immediate cash-reward for a huge traffic spike. Then, if it catches on, you could seek out individual sponsors, and do creative advertising for larger money. Then, of course, perhaps, the ultimate endgame would be the sale of the site.

The whole thing remains low maintenance of course. A simple registration system. The plea posting engine is just a glorified bulletin board. People can report bogus postings (things that are illegal, too distasteful, or adds) and the site administrator could have a real simple interface for deleting any of these posting.

What would be required to jumpstart publicity? I assume we get as many people as possible that we know to post. Then get as many bloggers as we know to write about it. Then send unsolicited info to other bloggers. Then post flyers? Maybe the key would be to plant an outrageous post then leak it to the media?