YC Help: Getting a rather small user base

[kyro]

I'm part of a research team that is on a mission to quantify beauty. Of course, such an objective is based solely off public opinion. I was asked to create a hotornot-ish type site with additional features, which is definitely feasible for me. The problem, however, is that as with any experiment that relies on polling the public, we need a statistically sound number of ratings, roughly in the thousands.

How would you go about marketing something of this sort? This isn't startup status; I'm not looking for millions of users. I just need a way in which I can generate several thousand ratings per picture. I go to UCI, so the student body is definitely a resource. Would spamming yield good results?

Thanks.

[Tichy]

Amazon Mechanical Turk

[kyro → Tichy]

The assignments on there seem very 'one time'-ish. Sure, I can put a set of 10 pictures and have them rate them, but we're looking for a much higher volume, and the ability to constantly add more pictures.

[Tichy → kyro]

I have never tried it, but I think people do high volume stuff there. If one rating costs 0.1$, 1000s should be doable? You should be able to constantly add new pictures, too, with the web services API they provide.

It seems likely to me, though, that if you complete the application and post it on digg, people will help you out in the name of science.