Business Idea: YouTube Theater
Description: A place where you can watch all of your favorite videos in a theater setting with popcorn and all that good stuff
Start-Up Cost: $25k – $75k
Potential Income: $500k+ per year
YouTube epitomizes the American dream of a quick business start-up with instant success. It falls into the same category of the great “garage” start-ups as Microsoft, Google and eBay have so masterfully done. It’s huge success comes from the millions of people who use YouTube to share their favorite videos with friends and family online.
There is only one little thing that I think YouTube lacks…an off-line community. There isn’t a gathering spot where large groups of friends can come together to one central location to view and enjoy their favorite videos.
So, why not capture the exponential crowd online and reap the wonderful rewards of launching a YouTube video theater in your very own town? Oh, but it’s so much more than a theater too… Here’s how it works:
Lease Or Buy A Building
Movie theaters are typically very huge, housing 10 or more movie screens requires a lot of square footage, but with the YouTube theater you will only need one screen to start with. This allows you to launch your business quicker and cheaper, and you can expand into a larger space with multiple screens once you get going and are making good money.
Of course, you need to find a great location that will attract crowds of people. A good location near a shopping center or a popular restaurant would suffice. Then you will need to advertise like crazy. Once a niche business like this catches on it should spread by word of mouth pretty quickly, especially with the words “YouTube” in it.
More Than Just A Theater
OK, you have your building, you’ve set up the screen and projection, installed the comfy chairs and maybe even some couches and lounge chairs, the concession area is set up and you have floods of customers…now, are people going to just sit around and watch random YouTube videos all night?
No, and here’s where it gets kinda interesting. Imagine it’s you sitting in this “YouTube Theater”, you’re with all of your friends, and you have a list of your favorite vids from online that you want everyone to see. So, you look up to the right of the big screen where a sign says “text in your favorite video to add to the playlist.”
Now you and your friends can text in your favorite videos to the YouTube Theater management team to screen and review your selections. Once the theater management approves your videos for appropriate content it will be posted to the video playlist. There could also be a plasma screen up in the front near the big screen that displays all of the videos that are next in the queue so that you know when your videos will play.
Pretty cool huh? I would go to a place like this in a heartbeat. I’m always looking for new places to go and new ways entertain myself.
Making Money
Unlike movie theaters that only get to keep a percentage of the ticket sale, you will be able to keep your entire admission rate. So, the amount of money you can make is only limited by the number of seats or standing room that you have in your space.
Let’s say you have 200 seats available and you charge only 4 dollars to get in the door. Each person gets a ticket number and is charged for every hour they stay in the building (so $4/hr per individual). That’s automatically 800 dollars an hour if you have a full theater. buy youtube watch hours