There is various sites which allow streaming of Live Video such as Ustream, StickAm and many others. Some of these shows are so large that they can afford to get items for giveaway. The way that they choose a winner is various means, be it “type what I say as quick as possible – first one wins” to register on a blog, make comments and so forth.

If you have a Blog – how do you know people are reading what you are typing? Mostly this is by comments and stick some adverts on those pages and you can earn some money if the site is very popular. The other aspect is if they run a forum maybe – in that getting people to visit can be hard – so what better way then to boost your ratings on the web then to get as many random people all registering and posting on your site in a vague hope they might get picked at random and win something for nothing.

Some of the Items offered are funny in Value – such as a Large Remote & a Large MP3 player. Some sites offer a complete computer and many just seem to offer a webcam, normally the very cheap CMOS one. The point I wish to make here though is do you need to spend your own money to give items away to complete strangers in the hope that more people come to your stream?

I still feel that a giveaway will only lure the people who will stick around only long enough to see if they can win the item no matter what it is – the stream will not get more popular due to this nor attract a large number of people. A Blog will stand on its own feet by contents, the same for the forum and so forth.