Problem: Humor photos today can only be discovered within a fragmented landscape of professional publisher sites, independent blogs or buried deep within Facebook & Twitter.
Don’t buy it? Try to Google funny photos taken on Chicago’s L train or locating a funny photo one of your friends took on Facebook last month from their Timeline.
Despite there being tens of thousands of hilarious photos personally relevant to you by theme, location, interest or social graph no one has bothered to put them all in one place allowing you to easily and permanently access these photos from your laptop or smartphone.
Solution: LOL.com's mission is to organize the world’s amateur humor photos connecting people through the shared love of laughter. On the web we do this by aggregating and indexing photos from thousands of independent humor sites and blogs so you can easily discover, find and share the humor photos most relevant to you.
In mobile, we connect you to to those who like to laugh, through the location-based humor photos you both already capture as part of your every day lives. We enable you to discover and engage with the funny things happening around you and right under your feet, in real-time, but also throughout history. This approach infinitely extends the value of humor photos by presenting them to you within their most relevant and engaging context.
Revenue Model: We have an advertising supported business model. Future revenue streams include traditional media publishing, book and merchandising.
Marketing / Digital Strategy: Initially we will crawl, organize and SEO millions of amateur humor photos from indepedent sources. Our digital footprint in search will enable us to build the LOL.com brand and generate sufficient traffic to generate positive cash flow on display ad revenue.
Our mobile app will leverage Twitter, Facebook, Google + to cross-pollinate photos captured via mobile and encourage new downloads, spreading the LOL brand throughout mobile/social.
Team: Nicholas Cavet, 32, B.S. Comp Sci.: Design, product & marketing strategy. Co-developed proof of concept mobile app & website. Current: 360i, Senior Digital Strategist, Ranked 2nd of 20,000 in 2012 Dentsu Innovation Competition
Elie Brangbour, 36, Current: Lead LAMP Developer, Greenroom.com, $2.5MM, Dashboard Ventures, BankOfAmerica.com
Proof of Concept
Our prototype mobile app 99 LOLS has been downloaded over 16,000 times as a free app and has a 3.5 rating. The average time a user spends with our app surpasses Break, BuzzFeed and College Humor by 53% according to Comscore. We do this with just 20,000 photos from 25 sources but because we make it easy to spend time with humor photos from multiple sources people are spending more time with us.
Shameless App Plug
Take our iOS prototype for a test drive and let us know what you think! The average user spends 3 minutes and 30 seconds with it.
Original LOL.com Humor Photos
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Launching app in Tribecca - 10:15AM West Broadway & Canal Street
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Launching app in Hoboken NJ, - 5th & Washington
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Launching app in Hoboken, NJ - 8th & Bloomfield
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Launching app in Millenium Park - Lollapalooza photo
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