Heavy made its name online as a music, games and sardonic entertainment haven and not only survived the dot-bomb era, but thrived in its aftermath. While the competition crashed around them, Heavy got cozy in its niche as a platform-neutral, cool content creator, keeping it tight online while also working in areas such as interactive advertising and broadcast programming and branding.

"Simon [Assaad] and I started the company three years ago and it came out of us working with ad agencies," recalls co-founder and co-CEO David Carson. "We were hired as a kooky bunch to come up with what we thought were good ideas but the agencies usually used them to corral the client to what they wanted to sell. But then we started to sell some of those goofy pitches."

Carson started out as a writer-designer, producing work for agencies like Ogilvy & Mather and McCann-Erickson, both New York, while Australian-born Assaad was known as an indie film producer. Their first major joint success came with a breakthrough interactive campaign for IBM's e-Business in 1998, which went on to win multiple Clios and the Grand Prix at Cannes. They invested their profits into Heavy.com, a Webtainment site rooted in high-concept sarcasm.

"We decided to build our own brand, create the type of programming we'd like to see and put it up on Heavy.com. Nobody was going to give us a cable channel anytime soon, so that seemed like the best conduit to do it."

They quickly developed irreverent online "shows" like Behind the Music that Sucks and games like Bitchslap a Rockstar. Word spread around the Web, especially after Mike Simpson (one half of the Beastie Boys'n'Beck-producing Dust Brothers) came across their Suck-o-Gram e-mail.

"Mike found it and started sending it to everybody and it began to mushroom. Within a month, 500,000 of those things had been sent. And a lot of them were from Mike's music pals," says Carson.

Demonstrating that who sees your work can be more important than how many, Heavy found itself marketing music. Their services division, falling under the moniker Team Heavy, worked with artists such as Aphex Twin, Bjork, Nine Inch Nails, and most recently, Gorillaz, the platinum-selling cartoon band, doing everything from complete artist or label site design, to creating band-specific streaming media players and Web applications tailored to each artist.

"It's just packaging it in a way that captures people's imaginations," he explains. "With Radiohead, there were no singles, there were no videos. The only alternative was to make the stuff pop online."

Though its programming is profitable, it was always intended to create a ready-made audience for its ad work - which enabled it to avoid the dot-com downfall.

"It was because our entire business wasn't about being a dot-com," Carson says. "That was how a lot of people got to know who we are, but Heavy already had a pretty established business in advertising and marketing [for corporate clients including AT&T, Xerox and VW]. There were a lot of bankers that wanted you to just do the Internet. That just didn't seem like a winning proposition."

The team pulls in about 20% of revenue from Heavy.com subscriptions and 20% from licensing their content for other Web sites, broadcasters and even T-shirts. Despite the impression Heavy is Web-based, it actually makes more money from broadcasting - largely due to Carson's pioneering work transferring live-action video to low-cost Flash animation and the discovery that it works well on TV.

While Heavy's in discussions with Tommy Hilfiger and Sony for future campaigns, one of their biggest current clients is MuchMusic USA, which hits about 24 million homes. Heavy has played a key role, both online and off, since the music network's recent re-launch. Heavy.com content such as Behind the Music That Sucks was retooled for broadcast and new MuchMusic programs American Suck Countdown, Video Votes, Mixtape Masterpiece and Tastemaker were developed by Team Heavy for MuchMusic USA.

"This year we've been continuing to produce all their identity work and act as creative consultant," says Claire Anderson, Heavy's exec producer.

With the demographic desirability of their site, they're also able to offer product placement on both Heavy.com and their 70,000-strong Heavygram mailing list.

"Generally people come to us with a project saying, 'We want this to be cool for an audience like Heavy's. How do we make it cool?' It might be a site, a marketing campaign or have a tie-in offline as well," says Anderson. "We serve as a focus group for a lot of clients. It's a really young shop and generally people are getting us to do something that we ourselves would like."