• NY Times, Monday, March 27, 2006 10:31 AM

Advertisers are desperate to reach 18- to 34-year-old males, because, for more than any other demographic, traditional media just doesn't resonate with this crowd anymore. Luckily, you can find sites like Heavy.com on the Web that are honed specifically for young men. Heavy.com offers animation, music, video games, grainy home movies, super models in bikinis and parodies of pop culture in a series of two-three minute clips. Advertising is ubiquitous, but presented in a manner of "knowing commercialism," in which the site gently makes fun of the fact that it has to support itself with ads, according to The New York Times. Little wisecracks like, "this will be over faster than your last relationship" or ".001 percent of your daily ad intake" greet users as they view ads that appear before video content, which, like everything on the site, is free. It makes all of its money from advertising. In February, the site attracted 5.5 million users, according to comScore Media Metrix, nearly triple the audience of a year earlier. The company's founders say they modeled Heavy.com after a video game, by offering more interactive video content and features than text. About half of the videos are submitted by users. To try to reach younger users, more and more media companies are building similar Internet services around video programming and interactive content. Smaller sites like Heavy.com, YouTube, Mania TV and Atom Entertainment are competing with the likes of Viacom, AOL, and Yahoo for users and advertisers. For example, Heavy has attracted such mainstream marketers as Virgin, Sony, Unilever, Verizon, NBC Universal and Burger King, often by blurring the line between content and advertising. Marketers have even reached out to users to help them create campaigns. In one, Burger King asked amateur film makers to create short videos featuring the masked king character now appearing in Burger King's commercials. Electronics giant Sony also paid Heavy to create an animated spoof based on God of War, one of its most popular games .

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