How to Build a Huge Video Site Overnight Through Unintentional Clicks

This past spring, a site called Freestreams.com was one of the fastest growing video properties on the Web. It had come from out of nowhere to reach 7 million unique users a month. Suddenly Freestreams was popping up on the top video ad exchanges—first a few hundred thousand impressions a month, then over 11 million a day in May, per sources.

The question is, how does a low-profile website that bills itself as a corporate information hub for a “software and services” firm for radio and TV stations suddenly get so big? How does a site that simply lists various TV and radio stations, exhibits a design straight out of the 1990s, houses a sports channel featuring Jeremy Lin in a Knicks uniform, and delivers autoplay video featuring cover images of random spaghetti westerns, attract so many viewers so fast?

[Check out the complicated corporate history of Freestreams' principals here]

Well,...

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