MakeaDare.com: All Jackass, all the time
The MTV show Jackass, which aired from 2000 to 2002, popularized the idea of doing crazy, self-injuring stunts and pranks and taping them for entertainment. I found it difficult to watch — seeing people injure themselves makes me nauseous. But the show was much beloved by my male friends.
Two movies and three seasons of the show apparently left people wanting more. Internet entrepreneur Troy Osinoff noticed a trend of people searching YouTube for amateur Jackass videos. Along with partners Jared Lunde and Mihai Voicescu, he decided to harness raw Jackass “talent” for a new site called Make A Dare.
It’s a brilliant concept and an impressive harnessing of user-generated content. Users think of dares, fellow users make videos of themselves completing the dares, and then people vote on the best performance.
Featured at the moment: Arm wrestling with a twist. The “twist” is candles, pins, and a mousetrap for the loser. More insane dares after the jump.
Here’s some of what users have come up with thus far. Users have dared people to:
– Eat as many hardboiled eggs as possible in 1 minute.
– Propose to a girl at college. (Which likely reveals the target age of MakeaDare users)
The site was launched this summer and is still in beta form, but Osinoff has grand plans for the future. Users earn “street cred” for fulfilling dares, but Osinoff hopes they’ll be able to earn more than that. He’s talking to production companies about the possibility of connecting them with top users to purchase the best videos for other Jackass-type shows.
Can MakeaDare.com compete with a site like YouTube? Osinoff calls YouTube “the Wal-Mart of the Internet.” He wants his site to have a sense of community and financial incentive that YouTube lacks. “We’re launching webcam dares so you can do dares live on webcam and setting up a way to put down a wager and you get a random dare,” Osinoff wrote to me recently.
“I just want people to come to the site and be happy,” said Osinoff in an interview. “I’m not worrying about the profit right now.”
While Osinoff thinks about funding, I’m trying to come up with a good dare to submit to the site. Any ideas?
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There’s a Darwin award waiting to happen here…
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