BluBet lets you and your friends bet on anything, while avoiding the rather controversial use of real money in online gambling. On BluBet, players will be able to place bets on anything from Brittany’s sex life, to Facebook outgrowing MySpace. The site is launching out of a quiet beta and is backed with $225,000 from Jawed Karim (Co-Founder of YouTube), Kevin Hartz (Co-Founder of Xoom), Joe Greenstein (Co-Founder and CEO of Flixster) and Keith Rabois (Former PayPal & LinkedIn Executive and Current Slide Executive).
You start off with 30,000 BluBucks, their fake currency. Bets are based on topics (technology, politics, business), much like a news site. Anyone can post a bet, which consists of a question, a pot, and an ante.
Bets are broken into two types of categories, polls and challenges. Polls base the outcome of the bet on the most popular response. Challenges base the winners on the outcome of some real world event (e.g who wins a football game). Every bet is live for a set period of time, with challenges needing the person initiating the bet to list the final outcome. You get 1,000 extra BluBucks for posting a bet and winners split the pots amongst themselves. Your winnings rank you on a leader board and are tracked in your personal profile. If you go bust, it’s marked on your record and you restart with 10,000 BluBucks.
Fraudulent bets, where users rally to affect the outcome, are naturally a concern. However, they’ve implemented a system where players rate how good a bet was after the bet closes. The rating for the individual bet is added to a users overall rating, hopefully making crooks with low ratings easy to avoid. Otherwise it’s a case of “Caveat Emptor” with spending your virtual dollars.
The founders see it as a simple way of creating a predictive market, although that’s not their goal. Even though free systems don’t motivate users with enough of an upside to be consistently accurate in aggregate, some free systems have discovered very successful individuals. Money-free PicksPal was able to beat the Vegas spread for sports, but probably serves as a proxy for a lot of the real sports gambling happening offline. Social stock picking startups are another category trying to create a predictive market based off of their users. Social Picks, MarketWatch, and the Motley Fool CAPS service are some of the sites taking this on without real money. Covestor is another social stock site that ties investments to your real account.
I love blubet. I’m drawn to one’s closing soon, this way you don’t have to wait six months.
This has been going on for a while with Inkling Markets http://inklingmarkets.com/ They are one of the companies coming out of yCombinator.
this is a really cool idea. someone needs to make similar, using real currencies.
Hmmm… bets without money. Defeats the purpose of my compulsive gambling habit. Without real skin in the game, gambling just isn’t that interesting.
What are the chances of gaming the system? I could create multiple user IDs and then have each of the User IDs vote for each separate outcome. Any which way I win. Its like the stock scams sent in emails. 50 Emails advocate a stock goes up and another 50 advocate that a stock goes down. I look smart to 50 people.
Can this be gamed using a similar but more sophisticated type scheme if there is no real downside?
But, I guess one would really have to be bored to create some many IDs
hiyaa whoever you sound really nice and sweet and i wanted to know if you would like to be my friend?well i gotta go now so c ya
Is it just me or is that logo a complete rip-off of the Bluetooth one?
Not really interesting …
AFRWIDSHFSK86176381AKFJALFKJS=
I don’t understand how sites like this continue to be popular without providing the user any real value. Web 2.0 is all about user generated content, but if the user isn’t getting anything for their effort, I see the 2.0 bubble bursting with greater effect than the .com bust.
I just dont understand how people are prepared to waste time, and in the case of ‘proper’ betting, real, hard earned cash on gambling…
This is such a frivolous and inane use of anyones time.
This website is doomed and those investers need ‘re-adjusting’ if they think this is a good thing…
RE: John Parker. “I don’t understand how sites like this continue to be popular without providing the user any real value.”
I get real value out of the site, and I would imagine the other more active users get value. Value is a perception.
lame, outrageous, silly, stupid, goofy stuff => eyeballs => distribution => revenue.
who says that speculating on inane things isn’t valuable? people who don’t care about it. but the fact is that the majority of the world is attracted to the lame, the outrageous, the silly, the stupid, and the goofy, and giving them a voice in the conversation is what web2.0 is all about. if tens of millions of people are text-voting on which 20-yr-old is the best dancer in the US, why does bluebet sound stupid? it doesn’t.
One thing no one has mentioned, ” It Seems Like FUN!. Forget whether the bets are for real cash or not. This will draw lots of people for the sheer pleasure of it. ebay was fun when it first started. It’s FUN just to win.
Surprisingly similar to Gottabet.com !!
“BetBlue” was taken?
There is also a similar startup here in Germany: http://www.beatjoe.de
Unfortunately the site is only available in German.
What I prefer is that they are more focused on making it a good and fun “game”, whereas BluBet gives you points for telling them your gender, inviting friends etc. Which surely hinders me, as a (maybe typical German &) rather “old school” user from playing at BluBet.
thanks Mike.
you just helped me win 7,084 BluBucks
heh.
Check out http://www.BetsGoWild.com – same concept but with a store where you can redeem your play money!!!
Britney Spears is kind of famous. Is it that hard to get her name correct?
This website is really nothing like a prediction market. (And quite dis-similar from what Inkling Markets provides.)
A prediction market is a futures market, that lets you buy and sell a contract that provides some payoff in the future. BluBet is just a slightly more complicated polling system. You pick what you think the crowd will pick (poll) or what you think will happen (challenge). There’s no feedback, so the only purpose is social. Prediction markets’ purpose is to provide useful information, though there is often social interest.
As someone who consults for corporations that are using prediction markets in their businesses, I can easily say there is quite a bit of difference.
@Jed Christiansen: “And quite dis-similar from what Inkling Markets provides.”
BluBet does not claim to be similar to Inkling Market. As a matter of fact, we are far from it. However, we are similar in the sense that both products are built to make a prediction. Inkling does so with a futures market and we do so with a gambling site.
I personally don’t believe complicated futures markets are the way to make predictions with a diverse user sample. It’s the collective wisdom that counts and we have built the place to deliver that.
This site is a copy of http://www.uBetWHAT.com
At first I was skeptical of the value of playing for fake currency, but as soon as I registered at Blubet, I got into it. The only problem is that the antes of varying magnitude confuse things when the currency is fake. I feel like the antes of varying magnitude are pretty much grouped as a single value. Unlike a bet with real currency, a 1,000 lira bet on Blubet is not ten times more important than a 100 lira bet.
I want to place a bet that President Obama gets shot within 18 months, not neccessarily killed, but shot. Where can I do this.