I can tell you which posts will make it to the frontpage. Can you tell me how to pay for my groceries with this?

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Hey /r/entrepreneur!

I am not sure where to go with one of my projects. Also, I don't know if holding a brainstorming session on Reddit is the best way to figure out the next steps, but I would like to try and see where this goes.

Basically, I have toyed around with Reddit data a lot and came up with an algorithm that predicts which posts will make it to top. I am not a wizard, so it's not like that you just show me a random pic and I tell you that that picture is frontpage material - it's more of an early indicator mechanism that takes into account stuff like the current score of a post, the number of comments, etc.

It's called Preech and here's the website. It's very basic, but it does what it's supposed to. The "success rate" is about 60%, depending on the Subreddit. I define a success as a successful prediction of an undeleted post that receives a score of 1000+. The predictions happen usually around when a post only has a score of ~20. As far as I can tell, this approach works for the major subs only and I get about 700 predictions a day. If you are registered, you should be able to filter out specific subs through the URL like this: http://ift.tt/1sygYZ1 - if you're not registered, the site will give you a nice internal server error.

I know that in some parts of Reddit it's frowned upon to be trying to make some money, but I don't think that's the case in this sub. And yes... I would like to make some money off of my projects. I have founded my first (real) company six years ago and tried to make it work. It's still running and it keeps me afloat, which is great. However, it is not the big success I wanted it to be (and I don't see a too bright future, either), that's why I started to branch out into other directions as well.

My goal with my new projects is to generate a baseline income, which optimally grows over time. So much for my intentions.

For the Reddit predictions project, I see various monetization possibilities:

1. showing all predictions to everybody for free, putting up ads on the site

2. showing some predictions as appetizers to anonymous users, showing more data for registered users, showing even more and better data for paying customers (this is how I have structured it up until now, except I haven't set up the paying part yet)

3. selling the content to content providers (I don't even know if I am using the right lingo here)

4. making the whole prediction part free and without ads, collecting emails through which I can sell later on (maybe my other projects)

5. creating additional services I could charge for, e.g. real time alerts where one could set up keywords (or domains, urls or whatever) and they would be informed as soon as someone mentions that keyword in a comment or post

I also see the following base principles at work which I have to take into consideration:

• "normal" redditors won't pay a cent for such a service, unless they really really like karma, and I don't know how many of those are around

• ads are probably not as useful either because most redditors are using ad blockers anyways (as do I)

• I think this service could be quite useful for marketers / PR people. However the advantage is not that straight forward and also time consuming, although the extra effort might be worth it: they could monitor which posts will be successful, jump on the relevant ones early and make a (good, feasible, Reddit accepted) comment early on to get some additional traffic to their cause. It is a huge advantage to be in the comment section early if you want to be seen. And when you get on a post early that gets two million views (according to imgur data), you can be sure that a lot of people will see the comments as well.

• I am not even sure if #3 is legal. Also, I don't know if content providers would pay to see these posts a couple of hours earlier than others. From what I can tell, online magazines and news sites and sites like Buzzfeed and 9gag are scanning reddit for content constantly anyways, and I am not sure if they would pay so see what's gonna be on the frontpage five hours earlier. I would imagine they are fine just looking at the front page and posting it the next day, as they are (presumably) doing it now.

• if possible, I would like to avoid putting in too much more work into this without being a bit more sure about the outcome. Meaning that if I have option A and option B, I'd prefer option A if it is faster / easier to implement and the outcome / impact of it is as uncertain as of option B.

Well, that's basically it. What do you guys think? Which of my monetization ideas will bring me the most moneys in the long term? Is this thing monetizable at all? Do you have additional ideas? Thanks for reading!

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