BetTube is an online gambling platform for betting on the future success of YouTube videos, and it is launching today. Users can bet that a video will get many new views in the next 12 hours. BetTube aggregates these bets into a blog of videos that are likely to go viral in the near future.
BetTube is launching with play money gambling only, but will allow real money gambling in the future. The rules of the betting platform entice users to bet on videos with a very low view count (usually below 1000) that will have thousands or even millions of views the following day. Experience shows that predictions generated by bets are quite accurate in many cases. By crowdsourcing these bets, BetTube will be the website that features viral videos first.
The Company
BetTube is a startup from Munich, Germany, founded by Clemens Ley in January 2013. Prior to working on BetTube, he received a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford. The company will demo BetTube at the Launch Festival in San Francisco (March 4 to March 6).
The Market
The market opportunities for BetTube are huge. YouTube is the third most visited website worldwide, with hundreds of millions of users. The online gambling industry has been growing at an astonishing 23% per year for the last several years. With online gambling becoming legal in parts of the US, the time seems ripe for startups like BetTube to disrupt the gambling industry.
Summary
BetTube will be the go to destination to find the viral videos before they go viral. At the same time BetTube creates a completely new form of online gambling. Video and gambling are extremely engaging concepts, and their combination will be even more powerful
