Monday, January 28, 2008
Beverly Hills based, Break.com is a video sharing social site that targets 18-30 male demographic. They basically focus on funny, crazy, stupid guy humor. As a hypertargeted Youtube clone, they have been doing well for themselves, steadily climbing to traffic upwards of 18 million uniques per month. Today they announced an ad network that extends their strong inventory reach to smaller web publishers.
While I'm not a big fan of Break, because they don't do anything fundamentally innovative (other than taking social video to an obvious niche), they are executing rather well. A year and half ago, they announced that they were going to pay publishers a semi flat rate for uploaded videos that make it to the front page. This has worked well for them because it gives an incentive for common bread and butter users who upload good (though often fake) videos to the site but aren't necessarily people who are trying to make full-time money off of it (ala Revver). They also have extended many partnerships with traditional tv publishers, clearly extending their reach further.
Now that Break.com has a good base, its incredibly smart move to sell/partner their ad inventory to smaller publishers. They have a strong sales and distribution channel that some stupid guy humor website would probably benefit well from compared to just throwing something like Adsense up. According to Techcrunch, they have 15 dedicated sales reps and have decent rates falling between $10 - $30 CPMs. So if you are small-medium sized website that sits in the mens or humor category that might pair well, partnering with Break is likely a much better deal then you'd do on your own.
As someone who falls into Breaks exact demographic and yet have very little interest in their site, I would have likely been not so kind in profiling them during their early stages. However Break continues to grow and execute well, and at the end of the day, that's what matters.
