Hi guys,
I’m choosing to put the cash prize on hold for the foreseeable future. This is mainly because I’m taking on new expenses this year and the site income is minimal.
It’d be lovely if the site was self-sustaining, so as always I’d welcome your money-making ideas.
Rest assured, I remain focussed on developing
caption.me, and it will be around as long as I’m around (I’m 31, so that’s another few years yet). :-)
Chris
Chris
That's perfectly understandable and I think that in most cases the cash prize, although nice, is not why people do it. Perhaps you can keep the competition open but win some form of recognition such as little medal or cup icons beside your name or profile image.
Something like that may keep the fun element in but remove the burden on funding.
Thanks John. I have heard from others that they’d carry on regardless of the prize or lack of. I will definitely think of new ways to reward people though, as it’ll be fun to come up with different rewards.
Chris
What about approaching a site like this
http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/?current=1
and asking them whether they would be interested in sponsoring a monthly prize on the site such as a voucher for free tickets to a show of your choice.
John
I agree with John, most people are in it for the fun and not the money. I like the idea of medals, perhaps there could be gold, silver and bronze with a medals table.
Maybe there could be other rewards instead of the cash prize such as:
- Supervotes,
- A couple of supervotes which can be used on the upcoming photos.
-
One random photo each month - the gold medalist chooses the photo, the time and date it appears.
- A joker - doubles the score for a caption, is played before the caption is added and only becomes visible to others once voting period is over.
- A randomise button - captioneer is not happy their captions have disappeared onto page 2 so activates the button which randomises the order in which the captions on no votes appear.
- A freeze button - stops everyone from adding a caption on a particular photo for 5 minutes. (To give you more thinking time, or just for the sheer hell of it).
Some of these have maybe been mooted before, I vaguely recall a joker being mentioned previously.
Any thoughts?
John, thanks, that’s a good idea. I’ll drop them a line.
@FMackay - Particularly like the idea of a photo as a reward. Maybe the reward could allow the captioneer to upload one of their own photos at any time directly into the competition (no pending phase).
Photo super-votes is a good idea too.
Need to ponder the joker/randomise/freeze features as they have the potential to be unfair on other captioneers.
@Chris
Just thought I’d throw a few ideas out there to see if you liked any. I understand what you are saying re the potential to be unfair, the randomise and freeze suggestions were something I thought would be a bit of a laugh and would maybe spark a bit of banter.
I guess a poll could be done for these sort of things or they could be tried out like the random photos were. I appreciate the time it would take to code such things is a factor too, you don’t want to spend time on it unless you are pretty sure it would work well. You’re right, it’s something to ponder on.
I would still enjoy you choosing a “caption of the month” with or without the price money.
Or maybe the price could be that the winner of the last month chooses the winning caption of the next month.
Hi Guido,
I like that idea but I think we would still need to have Chris choosing the main winner as well as having the ‘player’s pick’.
Yes, that would even be better.
I wonder - do we still need someone to pick the winner?
The supervotes seem to be quite well targeted. I think we could have two prizes - a “lol champion” and “creative genius” chosen purely based on who’s got the most supervotes. What do you think?
I think that a caption could get 20 votes and another only get voted on by 2/3 of the people but recieve lols - does it make it the better caption or just really resonate with a few ?
I am not sure that the super votes would necessarily sort the wheat from the chaf on all occasions.
Also, as the super votes are limited, it might not be the most popular that ends up top. It could potentially be the one that’s most popular with people who have super votes available.
I like the idea of the main winner still being chosen by someone independent. I think the voting could be skewed if the winner could be influenced at the end of the month by a well timed lol vote by one person.
Would it be possible to give photo winning captions a different colour than the rest of the captions on one’s profile? Not every caption with many votes is a winner, it would be interesting to see which are photo winners when you browse someone’s profile…
Thanks Guido, I have added this to the todo list
Any news on the monthly winner, Chris? I would prefer the caption with the most votes or the caption with the most voters to keep things simple and maintenance free. You could also translate the list of money wins to a list of numerical wins.
That sounds good Pete. I like the idea of having a medals table, gold, silver and bronze for the top 3 scoring captions. The existing list of money wins could be converted to golds. (Cash for Gold, or rather Gold for Cash) :">