In the spotlight: Keith Richman, Break.com

After starting his career at Disney, Keith Richman became a classic serial entrepreneur. Since leaving the Mouse House, Richman created a series of Web site businesses, all of which have been acquired by companies such as Excite and Sybase. His latest creation, Break.com, is acting as a media content portal, aggregating home video and photos shot by members, the vast majority of which are males between 18-35. Additionally, the company is supplying content to Amp’d Mobile. Richman spoke recently with Vince Vittore about the emergence of what is being calling the Little Media phenomenon.

On the content of Break.com: We get 300 submissions per day. We try to stick to the programming formula that has let us build this. It’s stuff that is short, primarily comedic, all submitted by users. We don’t go trolling the Internet. We were looking at really short stuff because we all have ADD. When we looked at mobile, we saw a lot of things we like. Amp’d Mobile is the one deal that we’ve announced so far.

On linking to other forms of video, including IPTV: We try to think of ourselves in much more of multimedia role. We look at everything with an eye toward convergence. Some 10% of our videos submitted from Europe are created on cell phones. We also think our content is great. The result is that sites like ours are able to develop a fairly large and loyal audience. Whether we consider ourselves as a broadband entity or an entertainment entity, we try to make the site entertaining. I’m a big believer that it’s going to lead to greater things. We are basically water cooler talk, like HBO was in the ‘90s. If you’re just talking about programming for regular television, we’ve got a great product right now. Clips of shows do very well. I see us being able to make the jump but it’s a different medium and people expect a different experience.

On the company’s traffic: We had 10 million unique users per month and we try to stick to the program form that users like. One of the things that the Internet is great at is allowing people to share their voice. What we found is that there are thousands of people that want to be directors.

On the revenue model: We haven’t yet begun to tap into video ads, which is probably the biggest opportunity. We’re at the infancy of creating an advertising model. From what I’ve seen so far, there is a strong focus on monthly unique visitors and how they interact with your site. We have tremendous loyalty. I think those numbers are pretty high for sites that aren’t dating sites or community sites. We’re probably going to move to a subscription model, too.