ArticlesMy million dollar idea for the week:
Sponsored CAPTCHA!
Surely it is worth a few fractions of a cent for an advertiser to have a user forced to type in their brand-name on blogs and commercial web-sites. I will be the middle-man, collecting a fortune!
I will target sponsors with slightly tricky-to-spell brands, so that they get the added benefit of users reinforcing the right spelling.
I’ll need a large base of brand-names to make the CAPTCHA sufficiently unpredictable; to start with, I’ll will sprinkle them in amongst random words, until the sample size is large enough.
So, who wants to be my venture capitalist?
Comment by Alastair on July 23, 2007
Hmm, I would have thought the original Coca Cola logo would be sufficiently resistant to OCR that you could just present it as-is?
I like the idea though. As a variation, why not present a series of similar-looking logos and, as a CAPCHA test, ask the user to match a given brand name with one of them. The benefit is that you can collect advertising revenue from all the corporations that supply a logo (but probably a premium for being the right answer).
Comment by Julian on February 10, 2008
Wow! I write a post about how CAPTCHA can help teach people tricky-to-spell words, and no-one notices/comments that I have misspelled “CAPTCHA” as “CAPCHA” throughout. (Oddly enough, I spelt it correctly elsewhere.)
Now corrected, even in the URL. (Fingers-crossed that there’s not too many incoming links here.)