Van Gogh didn't make a dime when he was alive, yet Michael Bay, the director responsible for the cinematic travesty known as "Pearl Harbor," has millions. Artistic merit certainly doesn't predict commercial success, but then again, what does? Perennially clueless film and television producers would certainly like to know.

Those corporate suits should head to a new website that does their work for them, by having people vote on the potential success of TV shows, books, movies, and bands. Mediapredict.com works differently than your average focus group: instead of letting the masses view, listen to, or read something before they say what they think, people are given $5,000 in virtual cash to sell or buy stock for whatever properties they think will sell, before ever having seen it. The logic is that the website's crowd, in its infinite wisdom, will choose what it wants based on the information in the brief information sheet attached to each work (there are also links to some bands' YouTube videos and MySpace pages). And since this is as much or more information than the average consumer would have when deciding to go out to the movies, buy a CD, or watch a TV show, the results are supposedly a good predictor of whether or not something will succeed.

Treating art and entertainment purely as commodities may be new and nauseating to some, but Mediapredict's goal isn't to make big bucks for producers; the aim is to "help media companies find what people really want" and "make media better." Yet up to this point, the site has generated the most buzz for a promotion that's been criticized as a distasteful profit scheme. Touchstone Books, an imprint of publishing company Simon & Schuster, has teamed up with the website for a contest wherein the company agrees to publish one of the manuscripts submitted by the public and voted on by site users.