User generated predictions for Euro 2008

Written on 9th June 2008                                                                                                              1 COMMENT
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Just before the start of a manic football night, I found an interesting blog post by a blogger from the evil side, Italy. Web professional Marco Corsaro wondered whether an “innovative player” was taking advantage of social media to market his services by using the euphoric state Europe is in. People are so sucked up into the game, that they will just participate in anything – as long as it has to do with football. A stupid example: I just dropped by the supermarket where you get a small lion – the Dutch mascot – for every 15 euros you spend.

When Corsaro browsed Facebook to find such an application, he found over 100 applications and probably chose the most logical way to go – number one on the list. It’s developed by the sports TV network Eurosport and Yahoo. This application allows its contestants to compete by predicting the right tournament results. The best will get.. a 42-inch Plasma TV. Corsaro joined the club and says the following:

So whoever thought about this initiative to drive traffic to the Yahoo!-Eurosport joint portal, is also using it as a “teaser” so users install the applications. And looking at the results achieved so far, I’d say, its not bad at all. My rank (I am the last one since I just joined in) is 38.648 out of 60.651 members…that makes me think that about half the people that have installed the application are also actively playing.

Good post mr. Corsaro, I hope your national team won’t play as nice.