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Keynote Presentation: itp.nyu.edu/~tjo230/itv/celebgossip.pdf

According to the Chicago Tribune, in August 2007 47 million people in the United States visited entertainment news sites - a 30% increase since last year. In comparison, 100 million people visited general news sites - a 3% increase since last year. What's more is that celebrity gossip sites usually prove super lucrative for advertisers, since most audiences that devour celebrity gossip also spend a significant amount of time shopping.

In fact, the business is so lucrative that former Yahoo! Hotjobs Vice President Anthony Soohoo actually left Yahoo! to pursue a celebrity gossip website startup called Dotspotter. Mr. Soohoo identifies three essential traits of a gossip site: 1. Capitalize on the emotional pull of seeing or meeting a celebrity 2. Get as much news as possible by drawing information from other sites 3. Create a social networking forum around topics

Currently, the major players of online celebrity gossip video seem to be ... TMZ - 9.4 million visitors/August 2007 OMG! - 6.7 million visitors/August 2007 People.com - 5.8 million visitors/August 2007 PerezHilton.com - 2.3 million visitors/August 2007

The acronym of the most successful gossip site online (tmz.com) stands for "Thirty Mile Zone" - referring to the center of Hollywood. The site is a collaboration of AOL and Telepictures Productions and is powered by Blogsmith. While the site does not pay for stories or interviews (though it does accept "tips" through an online form), it does pay for video clips and photos. Through its policy of accepting and broadcasting user-submitted content, TMZ has successfully broken many famous celeb gossip stories recently, including Mel Gibson's antiSemitic rant, Michael Richards's disturbing rant at the Laugh Club, the divorce of Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, and many others. Users may browse either by "most popular" stories, or through video galleries of specific celebrities. However, the policy of taking user-submitted content sometimes proves a bad idea; for example, recently the site posted a video of Judge Ito saying he was certain OJ is guilty. In fact, the person in the video is not Judge Ito; TMZ later apologized for its error.

Many of the other online celebrity gossip news sites that feature video content are actually based on magazines and/or TV shows that now see the need to provide online content. The trend seems to be that these companies are recognizing the potential of the Web as a forum for video - especially small snack-sized clips (like the ones offered on TMZ). According to USA Today, Time recently developed an in-house studio dedicated to helping 130 magazines develop videos for the Web with Brightcove. The Interactive President of Time Inc. Ned Desmond says, "We have at our disposal now a broad range of approaches for storytelling. The biggest challenge is to understand how to use all of those different things well and to engage consumers that way." TV Guid also made a deal with Brightcove to syndicate celebrity gossip.

“The cost of production is getting lower and lower," says Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire. "They would have never been able to launch TV channels around these brands (a few years ago), but now they effectively can.”

E! Online (eonline.com) is an example of a site based on the TV network. The online version offers "The Vine," which offers a plethora of video - and also includes mobile video. Similarly, Fox News has stepped up with "Lips and Ears" (foxnews.com/gossip/) which provides celebrity gossip. The video sections of TV Guide (video.tvguide.com) and Cosmopolitan (cosmopolitan.com/celebrities/video) are more examples.

The second most popular celebrity gossip site is OMG Yahoo (omg.yahoo.com), a relatively new site. OMG Yahoo! is another site that saw the popularity of celebrity gossip news, but unlike TMZ, OMG Yahoo does not create or post original content. Instead, it relies on the Associated Press, Reuters, and Access Hollywood for its news. Though the page enjoys many visitors daily, site statistics show that users seem to be more "passing through." It also claims to provide news more along the lines of "entertainment news" than "gossip."

People.com (people.com/people/videos) is another popular site offering an abundance of celebrity gossip video. However, Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is careful to distinguish People.com from its competitors. She says, "We still fact check, we are not mean spirited and we are accurate. You can't make as much money in the mean-spirited arena. I'll leave that to someone else."

The other major platform for online celebrity gossip video is YouTube. In fact, the Viral Video Chart shows the most popular viral videos of the year - and indeed, most of them involve celebrities. The chart also provides a list of all the top blogs that are linked to the videos.

Indeed, many popular bloggers (who enjoy immense site traffic) publish these videos on their blogs, leading to an increase of traffic. The prime example would be Perez Hilton (perezhilton.com).

In fact, Hilton's blog was so popular that a new show is coming out on television: What Perez Says. Similarly, a TV version will be released this year based on TMZ. Whereas before, most TV show/magazine content was being used as inspiration for building Web content, now we see examples of Web content being used as TV show inspiration.

Along these lines, I predict there will be less of a disconnect between content production for TV/magazine/Web. Instead, there will be equal consideration of how to distribute and alter the content for each medium, but most major players will have a presence in each venue.

The other conclusion I draw from my research is that the line will continue to blur between mainstream news and "celeb gossip" news (though it considerably already has). CNN already seems to deem Paris Hilton's most recent antics as the most newsworthy information of the day. Thus, the genre of "celeb gossip" will cease to become a specific category - it will merely be "news."