Why Contests Freaking Rule

What are specifically some good things to post to such collected email addresses?

Actually I am just running a contest for Candy Japan (http://www.candyjapan.com/?c=smbc) and had a default unchecked button to allow me to email them. Well, now I'm getting a bunch of people checking that button and giving me permission to email them, but not sure what to send.

Contests are interesting because it actually is a way of providing some (very small) value back to participants in exchange for contact information/viewing an advertisement/whatever.

Many companies would happily pay a nickel for an email address. Lots of people would probably be happy give out their email address for a nickel if it were 100% frictionless, but it just doesn't make sense to execute a transaction for that small of an amount. But give people a 1/10,000 chance at a $500 prize (actual value, $0.05), and you've eliminated the transaction overhead. It's actually rather win-win.

Almost makes me wonder if there isn't a business model somewhere out there that cuts out the middle-man of "content" in an advertising scenario entirely. If an advertiser is willing to pay, say, $0.25 for an impression of an ad, would users watch it willingly in exchange for a shot at a contest prize with an effective value of $0.25? You'd have to find a way to eliminate "farmers" or people outside the targeted demographic, but you could probably do that using Facebook or some other way to target specific groups of people.

The copy on this site is seriously misleading (http://contestdomination.com/?contest=dropbox). All the copy leads one to believe that you get DropBox Pro for simply filling out the form. Instead of saying "win a dropbox subscription" it says "get a subscription" and "Want to get a full year of our favorite online storage tool? Enter below to..[list of dropbox pro features]". This sentence further suggests that what you are entering is something else: "Enter the contest and receive exclusive offers and updates". Yuck.

I wrote this short piece because I think quite a few startups could benefit from running contests after launch to keep the surge of new email leads coming in the door.

Launchrock style pre-launch are awesome, but how do you keep the big subscriber bumps coming after launch day?

Selling things to the general public seems like a series of depressing lessons about human nature, particularly of the sort "people say they won't do/don't like x, but reality begs to differ."