• Mediaweek, Tuesday, May 29, 2007 11 AM

The well-respected business magazine is mulling the idea of a "business YouTube" that would allow would-be moguls to pitch ideas to the paper's readers, who would vote on a winner to receive $500,000 in venture-capital funding. Speaking at a conference in Miami, John Byrne, the acting editor-in-chief for Businessweek.com, said the company was looking to purchase a new technology platform to help create the interactive competition.

Byrne said the idea behind the move is to both widen the site's audience and boost repeat visits among existing users. Like a reality show, the idea's success hinges on quality production and editing. It simply won't do having camera-shy tech geeks outline their ideas in a monotone. Most likely, this kind of project would require a host, and filtering out the particularly bad stuff. Otherwise, you may only get a few VCs-which are a small portion of the BW audience--to watch. Make no mistake, this is content, which means it has to be solid to fly, or advertisers won't care.

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