Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 28) INTERNET T 28 dv january 2008 INFECTION BREAK.COM IS IN THE BUSINESS OF LAUNCHING THE NEXT STRAIN OF VIRAL VIDEO. BY DANIEL FRANKEL une into Break.com during any given 24-hour period, and you can watch two Canadian rednecks in a pickup taunt and threaten a couple in a BMW, until the handgun-concealing yuppie finally has enough and nearly goes Charles Bronson on the dimwitted pair. Or maybe you just want to see a skinny kid beat up a fat kid, or a girl fight another girl, or a guy fall off a skateboard and break his leg. Maybe you want to see a tutorial on Google hacks. Or perhaps you want to be among the first to witness the impassioned ramblings of a distraught Britney Spears fanatic before the video spreads all over the Internet and you’re not the first to tell your friends about it. Certainly, this programming lineup isn’t for everyone, and Break is pretty happy about that. While other Internet-video powerhouses — notably YouTube, the biggest of them all — embrace a broad-skewing, all-comers approach, nine-year-old Break has settled into a targeted philosophy somewhat analogous to niche cable television. In fact, when cable titans like MTV ponder where their coveted 18-to-34-year-old-male demo has dispersed to lately, Break’s largely user-generated programming — which draws an estimated 17 million unique users per month, most of which are young men — is as good a place as any to start looking. “I think the TV model is pretty much the way the Web is going, where advertisers know who is watching the show,” notes Break CTO Nick Wilson. “This is [Web] advertising’s next wave — through targeted demographic spending with known sites that have big traffic.” With advertisers eager to tap into broadband channels, Wilson believes Break’s audience offers a unique opportunity for them. “Reaching 20-year-old guys is very difficult,” he notes. Movie advertisers in particular have found the site and its demographic profile appealing. In fact, in July, Lionsgate even purchased a stake in the operation so that it could promote guytargeted films such as Good Luck Chuck on it. And the execution of this type of promotion is far beyond banner ads. Such movie deals — which, over the summer, also included titles such as the Paramount comedy Hot Rod — involve the creation of full-fledged content channels being built around them. User-generated content may have attracted to Break — which launched in 1998 as Bigboys.com — a hard-to-find youngmale audience base. In fact, according to Break director of content licensing Tara Leone, 70 percent of the video found on the site is created by users and posted to it through standard autowww.dv.com http://BREAK.COM http://Break.com http://Bigboys.com http://www.dv.com
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