Celebrity Sites Picking Up the Phone

Digital Hollywood, Santa Monica, CA—You’d have to be living under a rock not to have noticed the massive change in what constitutes “celebrity.” Moderator Alex Ben Block, editor-at-large for The Hollywood Reporter, introduced the topic by noting that the earliest days of motion pictures avoided making “stars” out of the actors, until the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford changed all that in the early 1920s.

But reality TV programs have instigated the biggest transition into the basis of celebrity, and Digital Hollywood hosted a panel on how celebrity media is transforming broadband, mobile, social media and TV.

“Flash forward to today,” said Block. “Now the celebrity is a bigger brand than ever. Now we have the ability to reach directly out to a website the star puts up, or to buy branded merchandise. That doesn’t mean you and Johnny Depp will have a personal conversation, but it’s brought us closer.” Today’s celebrities are famous for being famous or, rather, for turning themselves into brands and interacting with their fan base via broadband sites.

“The stars of the show and their interactions with celebrities is what it’s all about,” paparazzi1 says NBC Universal Television Distribution director, digital, David McMahon, speaking about Access Hollywood. “How we monetize it is a delicate dance because celebrities can monetize what they do. We monetize it by being relevant.”

Sibyl Goldman, VP, Yahoo! Movies, TV, omg! and shine talked about the element of “packaging” that her company brings to celebrity coverage. “We’ll bring in a group of celebrity moms and add a packaging aspect that brings the fans closer to the celebrity,” she says. “We work closely with our advertising partner to make sure it’s on brand for them. We work with content in all sorts of ways; it might be a talent talking about a movie coming out. We do a lot of award show coverage – everyone is making the news and we’ll cover it. We allow the news cycle to drive our coverage.”

Tyler Goldman, CEO, Buzzmedia, a social publisher focused on celebrity and musical verticals, notes that his company’s focus is “to publish deeply and broadly what people are searching for.” “If you’re a fan of a topic, you want as much info as possible,” he says. “With Britney Spears, we cover it with bloggers, user participation and Britney blogging directly. The user can consume large amounts of information all the time. There’s a component of commerce, but we monetize largely through advertising.” The insatiable desire for detailed and constant information about their favorite celebrities is key, and a good match for broadband’s capabilities. “News oriented, funny, users putting greatest photo essays…the web allows you to attack all this and make it consistent to the user,” says Goldman.

Todd Gold, managing editor, Fancast.com, Comcast Interactive Media described Fancast as a large TV destination.”We’re trying to make it the best for the TV fan,” he says. “We use celebrity in a variety of ways: we present all the popular TV shows, current and past. We have 10,000 TV shows online. We present previews and clips, highlights of things that just happened on TV, like great moments on Letterman. We cover and aggregate the latest news about the shows. Viewers have relationships with the characters and we cover them, as well as the celebrities who play them. We have original videos, franchise destinations, packaged as the shows you want to see that you’ve missed; shows from the 1990s; or cop shows. It’s really a site that we want the TV fan to enjoy. And we monetize it through advertising.”

Angie Shelton, VP, product and content development, at Wikia.com described the site as a “character/celebrity devotion site,” with 13,000 sites devoted to everyone from Luke Skywalker to Homer Simpson, garnering 20 million viewers a month. “The other way we engage with celebrities is when there’s a new movie or TV show coming out, we know the alpha fans are on the site learning more and sometimes we get the actors, producers, directors to come on the site and engage with the fans,” says Shelton, noting that J.J. Abrams did just this recently with regard to the upcoming Star Trek. Fanatics add 1 million words per day on the sites, she reported.

Ro Choy, chief revenue officer at RockYou reported that 140 million unique visitors come through its websites, which have live streaming components, video distribution and a network focused on social media among other features. “We also have a lot of applications with virtual goods and content, for celebrities like Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and others who want to monetize their presence on line,” he says. That includes virtual content such as Super Pets, Hug Me, a Snoop Dogg wig or stripper pole that people buy and send to friends. RockYou pays revenue shares back to the celebrities.

Though celebrity, personalization and fandom seem like a potent mix for the mobile phone, only a few of these burgeoning broadband sites have made the move. Access Hollywood, which has had an iPhone app for five months and a mobile website for a year, is an exception. “We can’t ignore mobile obviously,” says McMahon. “Not just for entertainment news but, to quote the Little Mermaid, you want to be where the people are. If they’re using iPods, PSPs, iPhones, that’s something to think about. Obviously you want to be there.”

The data on how people engage has been revealing, reports McMahon. “One of our largest traffic drivers [online] is photo gallery, and full articles on celebrity news update,” he says. “On mobile, photo galleries do well, but people read many, many blurbs about articles. They have the options to read the full article but they prefer to read the blurbs. So we’re designing the mobile site differently.” McMahon also reported that, with the iPhone app, page views are 50, “which is astronomical, so it’s an engaged user.” “What they weren’t doing is coming back every single day,” he says. “We’re taking those findings and fine-tuning the process.

Buzzmedia’s Goldman said the goal is to get distribution on as many media as possible. Buzznet for mobile gets millions of photos from children at concerts watching their bands. “That’s a great way to get people to create your content for you,” he says. “We also run blogs for paparazzi, and mobile is a great way for them to move to direct distribution from mobile devices,” he says. “It takes more than just a picture. GPS data will come into play more often. We’re offering something that tracks celebrities via GPS off of paparazzi’s cell phones. If you look at what people are searching for and provide them more of what they want, you’ll be getting more and more viewers.”

Choy notes however that “mobile applications are harder to write for.” “You have to build a client, whether it’s Brew or Symbian,” he says. “There’s a lot more complexity in the space which is why we’re not there. “

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