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Saturday, June 28, 2008

How to make money hosting ridiculous competitions

These days there is a contest for everything, I’ve found. Recently I published a post on Hot Dog eating contests, as well as blogger’s contests. The other night on the news I heard about an air guitar contest. The US Air Guitar website says it was founded in 2003 and it’s become a “major national event”.

The founder, Chris Jung, says in the following YouTube blurb that when the contest was founded, “We just all thought we were going to get drunk and just videotaped ourselves, you know, getting kind of crazy and stuff, but there was more media than there were competitors.” All you have to do is perform two 60-second songs, one you choose (freestyle) and another the organizers choose (compulsory).

This is a real competition, with regional and national champions, and apparently the regional competition comes to Phoenix tonight. Tickets for the event are ten bucks, but I see they are double that for the finals in San Fran. If you want to compete, there’s a $20 fee to enter, but if you win you could represent your city in the national championship.

As far as prizes go, if you win Nationals, you get a free trip to Finland for the World Championship, and if you win Regionals you get a $400 travel voucher to the Nationals.
You are judged on the following:

  1. Technical Merit
  2. Stage Presence
  3. Airness

This guy must be making big bucks - the competition is sponsored by Cuervo Black, and they make money from the dozens of competitions they hosts. Can anyone think of another ridiculous competition to make lots of money?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

First off, let me say I love your blog! I check in about twice a week and love reading the stories and checking out the companies you cover.

Something similar to air guitar competitions that is very quickly in the beginning stages of sweeping the nation is Adult Skeeball Leagues. We founde Brewskee-Ball (www.brewskeeball.com) a little over 2 years ago and we've now expanded to 4 cities: NYC, Charlotte (NC), Wilmington (NC), and San Francisco!

It's become profitable through the growth of the league and sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch and Miller High Life.

Anyway, just wanted to let you know I love the site! Keep up the great work!

My Vision said...

Who would have thought Adult skeeball would be so profitable? I want to do a story about this! Thanks for the tips.