Entertainment Goes Viral

Do you love those silly sites? The ones with all the funny videos and such? I ll tell you I m hooked on End of Ze World at FunnyJunk.com. I don t care how many times I see it, I always laugh. Just like the people that watch the Numa Numa Dance. I smiled the first time, but I just don t get the interest in that one. See it once and that s all I needed.

Anyway, if you like those sorts of things, you ll also love Kontraband.com (If you re Ninja enough). LOL Kontraband.com is like FunnyJunk.com with a definite adult edge. Some of the stuff is a little too over the top for me, but it s still damned funny.

I had a chance to interview the CEO, Richard Spalding, this week. Interestingly enough, Kontraband.com is really about viral marketing. Not so hard to believe. What a great format to showcase products! People come to be entertained and they are, but they may also be intrigued by what surrounds that entertainment. Unlike television, you won t get commercials to interrupt your viewing, but you will see links surprisingly, near the bottom of the page.

What struck me as funny is that the lead at the site on the day I visited said that Kontraband.com had gone ad free. As there were plenty of links on the page, I asked Spalding what that meant. We are currently reviewing our Banner Advertising policy and have shut down all banner adverts (apart from ones that are obviously joking. We no longer want to rely on advertising networks providing us with banner advertising. They tend to want to have a say in our editorial policies and that s a big no no. We want to focus our attention on active, self perpetuating advertising (viral) which we believe is the future for Internet advertising. Current trends believe that banner advertising is an outdated and lazy way for brands to promote themselves to their audience. Banners cannot build brands, they just sustain a brand s presence in an overcrowded marketplace.

Kontraband.com is loaded with content, so I asked Spalding where he gets it. We are sent a lot of content through our Home Movies section where users can upload their own content. We also find it on other similar sites to ours. It s a game of poaching and being poached in the Wild West of the online entertainment sites! Hopefully, Spalding is talking about public domain material and I assume much of this video funny stuff is. Why not? Free is good for making a rep.

The only downside I see to Kontraband.com is that some of the material is thoroughly adult and the warning is nebulous. We are a mature oriented site (17+), Spalding said. We have a clear sign which says NSFW (not safe for work), which is a warning. Not a clear warning, but a warning nonetheless. Spalding says he s working with US attorneys to determine a proper policy. We are discussing with our US lawyers for a better way to take a more responsible approach with risky content and put a disclaimer in place. US laws about such stuff seem to be more stringent than those in the UK, where Kontraband.com is based.

More than 400,000 unique viewers per day come to Kontraband.com, according to Spalding, and the site has an Alexa rank of 2,543 as of today. Pretty incredible exposure, eh? Spalding gave me a window into his tracking program. Wow! One site, which was displayed on Kontraband and seeded through multiple sites got 102,009 views on 2/24/05. OK, so that was a year ago, but just imagine how the exposure is today, as the popularity of the site increases.

I m intrigued by the fact that Kontraband.com concentrates on the marketing. (Rather guerilla marketing.) You don t really get it that you re being sold anything, but I found links there for the usual suspects investments, hair replacement, dating, and even the now notorious 12DailyPro. If you ve never considered advertising on these kinds of sites, you may want to think again. I probably can t afford it.