Part II: Hollywood promo drives traffic

IBeatYou founders NBA star Baron Davis, Cash Warren and Abdul Khan on making money and promotions

This is the second video of a three-part interview I conducted at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit with NBA star Baron Davis, Cash Warren and Abdul Khan, founders of iBeatYou (IBY), a site where anyone can hold a competition. In this segment, the guys talk about their revenue model. "Our strategy is sponsored-advertising," said Abdul. That is, IBY tries to get movie studios to promote their films by sponsoring competitions, and getting users to participate. 

For instance iBeatYou teamed up with Sony Pictures for its comedy film "Step Brothers," starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly. At this point, the competition has 156 entries.

As part of the promotion, Will and John put together a clip explaining the rules of the staring competition. Here's a screen shot.

This promotion brought more than 1 million views to IBeatYou. 

"This is really integrated marketing for the studio because people are talking about the product," said Cash.

The competitions connect "the user to the brand and the brand gets the opportunity to deal directly with the consumer," said Baron. "And the consumer dictates what's good about the product."

How important is it to have star power? I asked.

It's important. But at the end of the day, celebrities can bring traffic. It's the site that has to keep them.

"Once his [Baron's] fans get on the site and they're not engaged with the platform, they're going to leave. We're building something relatively sticky," said Cash. "Having celebrity involvement is just as important as building a very cool platform. One wouldn't work well without the other."

(Stay tuned for segment III this weekend)