''Gold Rush'' is an American

reality competition Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents purportedly unscripted real-life situations, often starring ordinary people rather than professional actors. Reality television emerged as a distinct genre in the early 1990s ...

web series A web series (also known as webseries, short-form series, and web show) is a series of short scripted or non-scripted online videos, generally in episodic form, released on the Internet (i.e. World Wide Web), which first emerged in the late 1 ...

created by

Mark Burnett James Mark Burnett (born 17 July 1960) is a British television producer who has won thirteen Emmy Awards including ten Primetime, one Sports Emmy Award and two Daytime Emmy Awards. His other accolades include five Producers Guild of America A ...

, designed by AOL, developed by VPI.Net and hosted by

Mark Steines Mark Anthony Steines (born June 7, 1964) is an American broadcast journalist and actor who was host of the syndicated gossip and entertainment round-up program ''Entertainment Tonight'' from 2004 to 2012, joining the program on August 24, 1995. ...

, that was released on

AOL AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc. The service traces its history to an online ...

in 2006. The format was of an internet scavenger hunt that is offering chances to win $US50,000, $100,000 and $1,000,000. In a November 2006 interview, Burnett discussed creating a second round of ''Gold Rush'', but it did not come to fruition.

Overview

''Gold Rush'' consisted of 13 rounds of gameplay. In order to qualify for a chance to win, participants had to correctly complete a series of tasks on AOL.com's ''Gold Rush'' hub in order to stockpile virtual gold bars. Many of these tasks consisted of pop culture trivia challenges and online games. Clues to help solve each of the challenges could be found in

CBS Television CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS (an abbreviation of its original name, Columbia Broadcasting System), is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainme ...

programs and commercials, magazines, radio, song lyrics, and on AOL curated and created by the marketing team of VPI. In each round, the first three players who completed the challenges and collected 12 virtual gold bars were taken to a location somewhere in the United States where they competed on-camera in head-to-head, reality-style competition (the "Gold Competition") for a chance to win $100,000 in

gold Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...

. In the Finale Round of ''Gold Rush'', the 12 previous $100,000 winners returned, joined by 6 new contestants, to vie for the $1 million grand prize. Various companies signed on as partners of ''Gold Rush''. Each company's brand was integrated into various parts of ''Gold Rush'', including game clues and challenges throughout the game. Best Buy, Chevrolet, Coke Zero, T-Mobile, and WaMu (Washington Mutual) was a leading sponsor in the inaugural season under the direction of Brendan Foley, VP of Digital Marketing at WaMu. WaMu used the sponsorship to increase our brand presence nationwide as we embarked on branch expansion on a national footprint. “We had a 21 percent jump in new free checking accounts in the third quarter of 2006" mentioned Brendan Foley.

References

External links

Gold Rush web site
2006 American television series debuts 2006 American television series endings 2000s American reality television series 2000s American game shows {{US-game-show-stub