MC Hammer Brings DanceJam to Challenge YouTube

You can’t touch this! That’s because it’s Hammer Time once again! Hammer hasn’t topped the music charts since sometime in the early 1990s, but the former rapper says he has another at least one more hit in him, but this time it’s as a Website developer. Well, at least his own site.

Stanley Burrell, better known as MC Hammer, is co-founder and chief officer of DanceJam.com. The Web site is scheduled to debut this month and will try to upstage YouTube and become the Internet’s hub for sharing and watching dance videos.

DanceJam then hopes to make money by grabbing a piece of the rapidly growing Internet advertising market, which is expected to rake in $27.5 billion in 2008, according to eMarketer.

The most watched video in YouTube’s 2 1/2-year history happens to be about dancing. The 6-minute clip, a facetious tribute called “Evolution of Dance,” includes about 25 seconds alluding to some of the moves that Hammer made famous back when he was still wearing colorful parachute pants as he sang “U Can’t Touch This.”

Until he saw what YouTube was doing, Hammer had doubts about the Web’s entertainment value. “When everybody started raving about the Internet, I always wondered, ‘If it’s so great, why can’t you see my videos on the Internet?’” Hammer said. “It looks like technology has finally caught up with my vision.”