TMZ: The Latest YouTube Killer?

TMZ.com, the high-tech mother of all supermarket tabloids, is riding the cutting edge of the internet’s lust for all things salacious and earning itself an unlikely new title: YouTube killer. Editor Harvey Levin and his wacky band of paparazzi won’t be putting a serious dent into Google’s online video superpower any time soon, but they have proven that there’s room out there for independent producers of original content who don’t bow to the ‘Tube… provided they’re bankrolled by Time Warner and don’t know the meaning of words like “shame” and “restraint.”

TMZ lures in a surprisingly large audience with headlines like “Xtina [Christina Aguilera]: Baby Poppin’ to Club Hoppin’” and “Spencer’s Head Emerges From Heidi’s Ass.” According to Silicon Alley Insider, in a recent week YouTube was still home to more than 97% of the 500 most popular online videos, but two TMZ videos also cracked the top 500. Theirs were the only offerings not from YouTube-style meta sites.

Thanks to TMZ’s unique “reporting” style — where a stodgier news outlet might name sources, they attribute information with phrases like “here’s what we got from our spies” — Amazon’s Alexa page popularity ranker now puts the site right up there with gossip industry legend Matt Drudge’s ‘Drudge Report’ (a site that now seems downright classy in comparison). In its own special realm — the supposed Thirty Mile Zone” surrounding Hollywood — TMZ breaks as much “news” as any outlet in the nation, much of which now comes with its own original video.

The gossip powerhouse’s video strategy is simple. They know folks click on two things: sex and celebrities. Odds are, you’ve been well aware of that since the day you tricked randy Yahoo users into visiting your dorky Geocities site by hiding “sexy sex jenna jameson sandra bullock pelvis” at the bottom in super-tiny white text. Or, alternatively, since you typed in “sex” in the search engine, clicked on the first result with pattering heart and sweaty mouse hand, and were dumped unceremoniously into some dude’s lame Gundam website with a bunch of minuscule invisible words across the bottom.