Break.com's Innovative Marketing Deal With Showtime

Heather: Was wondering if you and Steve are following the lonelygirl15 blather over at The Times. The fascinating piece of it to me is that both the Times and its audience seem generally unaware of the power of simply harvesting emails. The Times' screen editor asks if bloggers think her site, which claims to be a couple of kids goofing around with a vlog, is actually a professional job. (It clearly is done by pros.) People seem to think it might be an amateur job because they don't see any obvious advertising or commercial purpose to the site. I'd love to hear your feedback on the matter. On the one hand it could be dismissed as so much silliness. But I think lonelygirl15 raises a serious question: To what extent are we being manipulated so that marketers (or whoever) can create profiles of us through our web activity?

Hi Dan,

Who could miss the hullabaloo about our mystery girl, right? It's a great point. We have seen it, how marketers are looking at what's going on and trying to figure out how to coopt it and glean information from it. It's only bound to continue.

It seems to me that part of the reason why is people are spending so much time with the new kinds of content they are creating, and so marketers are desperately trying to figure out how to get into that new arena. And definitely, they will try anything...

Thanks for your response, Heather. Despite being a friend of Steve's, I'm serious when I say I've learned much from your blog and just enjoy reading it.

Break has always been a glorified porn website. It is such a shame that little children who frequent this site have to see the constant submissions from the paid and unpaid cam sites and xxx pornography that hits the just submitted on a daily basis.

It is about time this site had an adult rating on the search engines. I am also surprised that BusinessWeek is promoting this glorified porn site considering TMFT Enterprises other sites rumpers.com, sexytheif.com etc are also adult sites.

Partents need to be advised of the truth of this site so they can filter it for the sake of their children!

Break.com does not own those websites Christopher. Someone apparantly copied our terms of service/privacy policy and did not bother to even change the names. That truly is lazy. Break.com owns and operates one website - Break.com.

Thank you for uncovering these guys - they will be hearing from our lawyers shortly.