Got an inside track to who’s going to win the Republican and/or Democrat caucus in New Hampshire today? At Predictify.com you can make a few pennies if you’re right, but hurry and get your votes in.

There is a star system based on user participation ranging from a bronze star at 100 points to a platinum star for 10,000 points. With roughly 30 minutes involvement at the site I’ve made 85 cents and have 62 community points. Being that the minimum payout is $20, talk to me in like, well, a long time to see if Predictify pays. The top earning person on the site has made $113.76 and 76 people have made over $20 as of this writing. In other words, this is not a moneymaking opportunity site.

Community points are received for activities at the site like:

- 10 points: submitting a premium question (this costs $1 per prediction)
- 5 points: referring a new user
- 5 points: submitting a free question (only 200 responses can be received)
- 3 points: send a friend invite that is accepted if you click the Predictify graphic above, that has my referrer code in it)
- 3 points: post a comment
- 1 point: submit a prediction.

It’s strange that the least amount of points is attributed to the most vital part of the site: the predictions. Yes, you need outcomes to predict, but are the questions worth five times the amount of the predictions themselves? I can understand submitting premium questions being more valuable because that’s one of the ways the site is being monetized, but I’d argue that the # of points for predictions, particularly predictions from those who have a higher percentage of predicting the outcome should receive more points.

Predictify does incent those who predict the outcomes more correctly by paying them a higher percentage of the premium questions. I’m at the Scholar level (50-74% accuracy) for Politics, which means if I answer a premium question correctly in this category I’ll receive 1.5 multiplier of the payout. The highest level one can achieve is Guru (90-99% accuracy) which receives 2.0 multiplier. Again, don’t get too excited about the money angle, because there is a small percentage (~5%) of premium questions available.

I didn’t see any banner or contextual ads at Predictify. It appears the only way the site is making money is from taking a cut of the premium questions but I’m guessing at least with the sports outcome questions they could turn around and be selling the Predictify outcomes on a sportsbetting site (outside the US where online gambling is legal, of course). They prevent others for using free questions in certain ways: “Predictify may not be used for securities replication, odds-making, betting, gambling, or wagering.”

The New York Times has a subdomain using Predictify for the NFL playoffs at nytimes.predictify.com.

Not sure the NY Times tie-in as I don’t see any API, but if/when they decide to release one (?) news of this will probably appear first at the official Predictify blog, which uses TypePad.

Summary and grade
There have been so many voting-type sites come and go over the years that the outlook for Predictify is not good. If the site keeps the current clean design and maintains enough interest, they’ll last longer than most. Definitely need a higher percentage of premium questions to help maintain interest and if an API isn’t available, they need one yesterday. Grade: C+

Did this post make you go hmm?

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