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Contests2Win Sets Up YouCharades.com: WATBlog Pays a Visit
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Last month the guys at Contests2Win brought the good ol’ dumb charades online with their brand new site - YouCharades.com. WATblog decided to go browse around on what seemed an intriguing concept, and here is what we thought of it all. Back in May we had reported C2W coming up with a WebCharades concept site, while the name didn’t remain the idea has come out quite well.
The Concept
The concept of YouCharades is simple, you answer charade challenges uploaded on the website and earn points for every right answer. In essence it is a mix of Contests2Win’s traditional approach of contests, points and prizes with the web 2.0 way of media sharing. The idea certainly is catchy.
The Works
This is how the homepage looks, and even though effort has been put in making it a clean and attractive design the framework reminds a lot about YouTube. Now this is neither a good nor a bad point, it’s just the way it seems and I personally don’t see it having an impact on the user’s perception.
Overall the design and layout of the site is pretty good and has a very rich feel. However, the site could do well with some added clarity on what the site is about. This would mean highlighting the following points somehow:
- A good ‘about YouCharades’ on the homepage to distinguish itself from other video uploading sites
- Highlight the help section, maybe a 3 simple steps to YouCharades, they can even use the banner that they have in the inside pages on the homepage
- Showcase benefits of hanging around on YouCharades. What can the points be used for etc.
The Game
Playing the game wasn’t as tough as I thought it would be, and mind you I am amongst those lot who just can’t figure out names in a good sitting of Dumb Charades (even if my fellow mouths the words for me :P).
The words to guess are divided into popular categories like books, movies, personalities, etc. I played a couple of games and did alright to me credit. 
So though even when I didn’t quite know the books I was guessing I guessed them quite alright given the hints (that come right at the end of the video) and the very useful correction tool, actually it doesn’t correct you it just says if you have got the right word with a tick or a cross.
The Help section was actually helpful, and also lays the standards for certain common uses, considering there are numerous symbols for dumb charades around the world (I have played 3 versions I don’t know about the others) this is certainly useful.
The profiles pages are also well done, and gives a lot of scope for community development. And the fact that they encourage top users through the best actors and best guessers widget in the homepage should bring a lot of active guys to the place in my opinion.
Considering my abilities in charades are best suited to guess randomly I didn’t try uploading a video. Though the options they have to put up your own charade is pretty nifty, you can record your act from the webcam directly from the site (is this feature common?).
Conclusion
For C2W this is certainly a big jump from animated content and certainly gives a freshness to the whole whiling your time away on the net resources that they make (I don’t mean that in a bad way but that’s what it’s all about). The whole site is still in alpha and perhaps the beta launch would bring in a lot more features for us to see.
The whole setup has a lot of potential to be big, though getting users to contribute beyond guessing names might be a tad difficult. And from what I see they have paid actors doing the job these days, I don’t know how viable it will be to continue with it in the long term, if they are.
An important aspect that I noticed was the Youcharades blog having comments that are linked to their Contest2Win profile. Though I didn’t quite sit to see if they have done some good cross linking to Games2Win and C2W, there does exist a wide scope to do that, and generate traction for each of the network sites.
Given the growth and scope of video sharing that we have seen in the past couple of years, this certainly has a lot of business potential. And unlike Youtube this will certainly not face copyrights issues and other legal tangles. This could mean that with a good set of audience it can go the Hulu way and be a high revenue entity even without an extremely large audience like a Youtube.
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Just tried it.. have to admit.. its fun. But is this the first site to offer such a service?
Hey great to see you liked it Balu… from what I know yes they are the first site to do so…