I’m intrigued by the success of infomercials as a vehicle to sell products. Infomercials are a $256 billion-per-year industry (including its business-to-business component), according to the Electronic Retailing Association. The fame and success of the Foreman Grill, numerous exercise machines etc. etc. is clear.
The reason? The infomercial and the entertaining theatrics of the man behind it.
WMJ entrepreneurial idea of the day: what about an e-commerce emporium, where via video blogs people sell one or two products a day. It would be like a daily cool hunting site meets digg meets YouTube meets the infomercial. The best sellers would rise to the top of the listings, and there would be a daily top ten listing of sellers. It would be Internet-enabled democratization of the infomercial and seems like something YouTube.com could do to generate revenue, or an interesting opportunity for eBay.
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:30 am
[…] I saw the “Horny Manatee” site, an entertaining (work safe) website devoted to raising funds and awareness for the endangered Manatee, and for some reason it got me thinking about my digg meets youtube meets the infomercial idea I wrote about back in June. I think a site that featured a series of 15 second infomercials of really ugly junk hosted by a theatrical host dressed in an ugly monster costume (the costume is key) would be huge! There is a market for obscure, ugly junk (junk that is hilarious, because it’s so ugly), but the real opportunity is creating a community of visitors who go to the site for its entertainment value. It wouldn’t be hard to initially find and arbitrage ugly junk from eBay and garage sales etc., but the site could easily design its own completely ugly junk too, which is more scalable! […]