Ask the readers: If you could drop 100M users onto any site, what would you build?

A great hypothetical question…
My cofounder Matt Rubens recently posed a great question to me over dinner:

Let’s say you had unlimited access to internet traffic, and could literally dump 100 million unique visitors in a single shot onto a site – what would you build?

I honestly don’t know the answer to this question, but here are a couple considerations:

Any vertical site, be it pets or cars or even gaming, would ultimately lead to a huge % of the 100 million immediately bouncing and being lost – this might be OK, if the category is high value enough?
Conversely, communication is probably the most horizontal application you could do, but it’s low monetization and not clear that you can go build in more depth after people think of you as a communication site

What do you guys think?
I would love any ideas or insights you guys have on this question!

Please comment to this post or send me an email at voodoo [at] gmail.

Written by Andrew Chen

February 22nd, 2008 at 12:55 am

Posted in Uncategorized

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Why not games (I mean casual game that is) ? Nearly every internet user is some kind of casual gamer and monetization is exellent.

Mathieu Nouzareth

22 Feb 08 at 5:31 am
A coupon affiliate site – who doesn’t want to save money?

Immediate monetization
Immediate segmentation by affinity

Lots to build off from that starting point

Jonathan Mendez

22 Feb 08 at 7:06 am
My biography and a lot of pictures.

I always wanted to be famous (:

Mauricior

22 Feb 08 at 10:20 am
If the goal is to make money then I don’t know.
If the goal is to make meaning and help make the world a better place then I would say wait until it’s in beta.

j

22 Feb 08 at 10:49 am
Everything in one place on the Internet with easy access from cell phones: I can easily connect to my friends with ecards, invites, slideshows and polls, talk to them when they are online or text them with pre-typed messages, use the mobile coupons while I’m at the checkout counters, look up the recipes while I’m making dinners, browse celebrity hairstyles while I’m getting my hair done, etc. In other words, the users will be always connected, informed, and entertained.

isayusay

22 Feb 08 at 11:00 am
simple. whatever vertical has the highest $ / user. maybe a travel engine..

noah

22 Feb 08 at 11:16 am
A semantic wiki preloaded with basic information about a broadly popular topic, like TV. The semantic bit is important. I’m just now learning about some of the efforts to extend MediaWiki in this direction, efforts that will make MediaWiki-based sites FAR more useful in the future.

If it was just about money, though, probably something named WhoaTube that was solely for Xtreme videos.

G M

23 Feb 08 at 2:36 am
I would sell it to another person or organisation who had the money to buy it (lot of money) and a dream/idea to accomplish

Iker

23 Feb 08 at 10:48 am
the real questions are “what are people really interested in?” and “what can give me big money?” and “what thing is in both answers?”
answer: sex, obviously.
i’d build a huge porn site. all kind of sex and all kind of services: a video streamer, a contacts service (or, even better, an adult oriented social network), downloads, a sex toys store, adult industry news, webcams, maybe a sexual tourism agency… all in one, and, unlike most porn sites, with a nice elegant and clean design.
sure it will lost a lot of people, but still it’ll be enormously worthy

P. Franks

23 Feb 08 at 1:03 pm
A page full of AdSense. Maybe all the visitors will never come back, but at least I would make a lot of money in one day.

Andres

24 Feb 08 at 4:24 am
Build a 3D social network around the following interests (from your list below):
* Fashion
* Knitting
* Board games
* NASCAR
* Kittens
And extract at least $1 per user by:
* selling virtual goods related to fashion
* make & sell virtual goods – the knitters out there
* selling flash games in 3D rooms
* selling virtual cars
* selling furry virtual goods

And there’s already one doing that today, and it’s not SL…

spanky

26 Feb 08 at 12:12 pm
I’d drop’em on an all new search engine that was relevant and fast – super horzitonal! Why?

One of the top things google has going for it is that people are trained to go to it. Honestly, the other search engines out there are solid and can win new users if people tried them. Of course this hasn’t been totally proven true by recent massive ad spends that have not changed query share in a meaningful way…but hey, it’s still worth a shot.

Plus, even if I lost a ton of users, the data on which searches were done and what typical sessions looked like would give me massive insights that could tell me other products / services I should build.

Finally, search ad rates / rev share are good.

Real good.

Bubba

3 Mar 08 at 2:01 pm
a general e-commerce portal with multiple and diverse categories to target the most of the audience.

justinkadima

10 Mar 08 at 5:14 am
http://www.yougotrickrolled.com/

Maybe it wouldn’t be long-term profitable, but it sure would be funny.

Rob Sandie

27 Mar 08 at 8:48 pm
Thanks for sharing.

Logan
http://xtonlinegame.com

nulls101

15 Oct 08 at 12:55 pm
great post thanks!

Sex Toys

27 Jan 09 at 2:46 pm