GoChongo: More Contests, More Money

Gochongo! The name has a ring to it doesn't it? The startup GoChongo just entered private beta testing April 1^st and is scheduled for public testing by today. The site is a community where a contest format is used in order to put artists and producers together. The twist here is that any person or business can be the producer by simply posting a project.

The way this works is a user submits or produces a concept which is in turn selected by a performer. The performers submit their creative works to be voted on by the Gochongo community. A winner is selected and receives whatever reward or accolade there is for that production. The current categories to submit projects to are Video, Music, Literature and Imagery. The range of categories and topics can obviously be much wider than this as necessity dictates.

Mashable suggested earlier that GoChongo is experimenting with ad revenue sharing which seems logical, but I did not find much evidence of that in my little beta adventure into the site. There are a small number of productions underway however, and though the number is small right now the obvious attractiveness of the community is apparent. GoChongo is fairly simple to navigate through but could use some tweaking.

The site is nicely done if not replete with the bells and whistles we have grown accustomed to in other offerings. The potential of GoChongo rests in the company's ability to draw people who will pay for projects really. User generated solutions and contest offerings will follow the money naturally.  

This site follows basically the same path as Jabbits and a few others loosely organized around video or other solutions to project submissions. I have to say that Jabbits is much farther along in their Flash development and UI, but GoChongo could easily catch up with a few weeks work and some support. We are after all talking about coding here and not Space Shuttle wiring. The little beta money needs to kick it up a notch to make this into a successful site. Has anyone out there got $500 to spend on a creative solution? In fairness this is a really embryonic stage for this likable beta so I cannot be too harsh in my commentary.

The various sections of GoChongo contain some cool categories all ripe for the right producers and contestants to come along. Most of these do not currently contain any productions but hopefully GoChongo will come out with a press release and some contests to draw people. Current productions offer some monetary rewards like the $25 for the winner in the Public Service Announcement for Adults project below. The field appears to be wide open for this one folks, so someone should be able to scarf these 25 bucks pretty easily. I know some of our readers can do better than the responsible drinking example.