How To Monetize A Fad

by Chris Woodward

A few weeks ago Shane wrote about the newest craze sweeping across America, Tebowing. While talking to Shane earlier today, we both agreed that while the site may be wildly popular right now, a lot of things would have to go right in order to keep the interest up. Let’s face it…Tim Tebow probably isn’t going to last as an NFL quarterback and therefore neither will the Tebowing fad. Other than people wanting to see pictures of themselves, the site really doesn’t have that much going for it. There is no humor, no witty comments, nothing to keep a visitor interested. I viewed about 2 pages today and was pretty much over it.

While I don’t think the site has the substance to last forever, it does have one thing going for it right now that makes it extremely valuable…traffic. However, the traffic is only valuable if it is put to good use. Right now the owner of Tebowing.com has a tremendous opportunity but he needs to act fast in order to cash in. The best thing the owner can do to use Tebowing.com as a revenue stream is to use the traffic and drive it to one or two other sites that are more sustainable, creating a network of sorts. To do this he’ll obviously need to come up with another witty idea or two and create sites based on those. Those sites should be based on humor and do a better job of hooking a visitor. If he can do this, he may really have a chance to be successful.

This idea is in no way new, it’s been done hundreds of times around the internet. ICanHasCheezburger.com promotes and passes traffic to FailBlog, LOLMart, etc. while those sites pass traffic to each other and to all of the other sites in the network. All of these sites are wildly popular but they got that way promoting each other. I wish the owner of Tebowing.com the best of luck and hope he can find his own magic formula to monetize something that isn’t going to last forever.

With that said, I’ll go ahead and pass along my new favorite humor site that I discovered recently. Full House Reviewed is a hilarious website where a writer reviews every single episode of the 90’s  television show Full House in great detail while inserting their own opinions. The site is littered with curse words which just makes it that much funnier given the context. I highly recommend you check it out…My description definitely doesn’t do it justice and if you remember watching the show when you were younger you will definitely get a kick out of it as I did.

It’s site’s like ‘Full House Reviewed’ that are definitely on the right track. The content (and there is a lot of it) becomes almost addicting because of the humor and the owner has the blueprint to now do this with any cheesy TV show from the 90’s, which they appear to have already started given the links on the sidebar that point to similar sites. The sites could definitely use a redesign, better monetization techniques, and their own domain names instead of the WordPress url’s…but overall this is the exact kind of network that has the potential to take off and become a big money-maker. Tebowing.com, take note.