Heavy's video stew

Saul Hansell in Monday's NY Times: A Web Site So Hip It Gets Laddies to Watch the Ads. (Photo: co-founders David Carson, left, and Simon Assaad)

Heavy is honed especially for young men. It mixes animation, music, video games, grainy home movies of oddball characters, supermodels in bikinis and pop culture parodies. Often, all of these elements are squished into a single two-minute clip. Advertising is everywhere.

This potent stew drew 5.5 million users to Heavy.com in February ...

About half of the videos are submitted by amateurs, but Mr. Carson and Mr. Assaad put up only those that fit Heavy's rude and wry sensibility.

"Heavy has always been about our point of view," Mr. Carson said. "That's why we have attracted an audience." ...

More and more Internet services are being built around video programming rather than traditional Web pages, and much of it aims to attract viewers in their late teens and 20's. ...

Heavy has attracted mainstream marketers like Virgin, Sony, Unilever, Verizon, NBC Universal and Burger King, often by blending content with advertisers' products.

For example, it commissioned amateur videomakers to create short videos featuring the masked king character who now appears in Burger King's TV commercials. And Sony paid Heavy.com to create an animated series called "Pimp My Weapon," which is recut from Sony's "God of War" game for PlayStation 2.

These kinds of segments have proved to be extremely popular. People have watched the Burger King character videos 9.1 million times and the "Pimp My Weapon" segments 6.5 million times since September. ...

[The site] expects advertising revenue of about $20 million this year, up 300 percent from 2005.