Michael Ingram

Springfield, MO (USA)
Role(s):
Founder/Owner/Principal

www.WeChannelNews.com

Find More Startups Startup
Location: Springfield
Industry: Internet
Year Founded: 2007
Number Employees: 1-10 people
Description: We Channel News was founded and created to deliver consumers a free, customizable news site that can be tailored to users' individual interests, thus minimizing exposure to unwanted infotainment. Besides customizable Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, We Channel News' homepage is going to be a compilation of the already-proven most popular stories on the Internet, which will be located without the help of algorithms, logarithms or any other -rithms. As far as we know, this is a first, a true original approach to top news. The current problems with today's news are (1) multiple news stories from multiple sources, posted on multiple websites and (2) the generic syndication, negativity and in-your-face delivery of most major news networks. Today's mainstream news has become so focused on death, destruction and fear that finding reputable stories from creditable sources has become burdensome. The solution to this is We Channel News. Huge, revolutionary, unparalleled and a whole slew of adjectives could be used to describe We Channel News, but unique fits us best. Everyday, ordinary people find interesting news and entertainment stories, pictures, videos and blog entries from primary and secondary sources and share them with the world on aggregator websites such as Digg and Reddit. These sites base the visibility of such stories on their popularity, as voted on by the users of that particular site. The problem arises when savvy Internet surfers must navigate multiple sites in order to find what's current, popular and hip. This is time consuming and we have found a niche in this market that can be exploited to accommodate the more amateur Internet surfers by providing them with a single, all inclusive website. By compiling the most popular stories from various user voted on, news-aggregator websites, and posting them on homepage of We Channel News, we thus eliminate the need to visit multiple websites in order to read the latest, most popular information on the web. Theoretically, since all of the stories we post on our homepage have already been proven popular by receiving the most votes on those various aggregator sites, our homepage should be a successful one-stop-shop. However, we realize theory is worthless without execution and that is why this initial idea is just the tip of our iceberg. The rest of our idea consists of user-specific RSS feeds, which are routed directly onto your profile page where you can also communicate with other users and post blogs. So for example, if you are interested in politics but only trust certain sources, you can customize your RSS feed and only receive political articles from those sources you trust. This option works with any category; if you would only like to read sports articles from CBS Sportsline and nothing else, you can. What We Channel News is essentially creating is a homepage with the most popular stories on the Internet, which is accessible to anyone, and a customizable profile page for those users who sign up and create a profile. Our opportunity for success is enormous, potentially monstrous. While Digg and Reddit are not our direct competition because we currently do not allow users to post their own stories, they nonetheless command an overwhelming market share; Digg is rated in the top 50 websites based on traffic and Reddit is not far behind. By tapping into this under-40, internet-savvy, I-get-my-news-online segment of the population, we will be able to rapidly spread our idea. And as our prevalence grows, we also intended to wade into the untapped over-40, broadband connected, I-get-my-news-from-television-and-newspapers segment by utilizing and advertising our one-stop-shop approach. We intended to generate revenue by utilizing the latest advertising techniques, specifically the Cost Per Impression (CPI) model. This will allow advertisers to set the amount of impressions they wish to receive, meaning that their advertisement will be viewed a guaranteed number of times. We currently have sixty spaces available for advertising at four different price points, which are determined by the size and location of the ad. An ad on the front page, for example, will cost $25,000 and last for one million impressions, which calculates out to cost two and half cents per view. This is just one of our price points. Our goal in our first year is to sell all of our ad space and we have tentatively calculated that if we achieve that goal at our minimum stated prices, we should generate $505,000 in revenue. As traffic increases, we can adjust price per impression, contract length, ad size, location and many other variables to increase profit. Every successful company starts with an idea; ours is a website to present news in a unique, original way.