Bragster, a social-networking site that lets users dare friends into action—from chugging alcohol to dying your hair pink—track their successes and failures and then brag about it, has raised $3.5 million in a first round of funding.
London-based Bragster said it has built an audience of 800,000 viewers in its one year of operation. It didn’t specify if that number represents unique visitors per month.
The startup adds to the explosion in niche social sites, such as ones for nurses, models, and music lovers. The list goes on. Social site users have shown that they want smaller, more targeted, groups online, as opposed to the broad, some say unwieldy, networks found at the behemoths of the sector, like MySpace.
This shift should also be good for advertisers and web site owners who depend on them for revenue.
But investing several million dollars in a site for dares sounds more like the result of a, well, dare than a sound financial decision. The folks at Intel Capital, the global investment arm of Intel Corp., who plunked down the millions must see something I don’t.
I dare you to take a look for yourself.