Celebrities Gaining Online Fan Base Through Web Sites
Give Roseanne a couple of colorful cooking partners and a camera, and she’s ready to give Julia Child a run for her money.
“I had the most fabulous show with a gay man and a gay woman,” Roseanne said of her weekly online cooking program “Viva la Fat,” which airs on her Web site, RoseanneWorld.com.
“We discussed food and gender identity, and we cooked the most fabulous macaroni and cheese with a footlong, 12-inch, all-beef, kosher, jumbo hot dog.”
Besides free hot dogs, Roseanne said having her own site allows her to deliver content free from restrictions imposed by network executives.
“The Internet does away with middlemen,” she said. “You can’t have anybody tell you `no.’ If I want to have a naked midget helping me in the kitchen, I’m going to do it. There’s no creative space anywhere else, and the world needs that.”
Of course, some celebrities have a much larger online fan following than others. Musicians, especially Britney Spears, ‘N Sync and Backstreet Boys, tend to attract the most traffic, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
But the largest entertainment-related Web ratings of all belong to adult film stars - which should boost Dennis Rodman’s scantily clad new venture, RodmanTV.com.
Launched in August, Rodman’s site is members-only and offers live 24-hour camera feeds from the basketball star’s Newport Beach, Calif., home for $19.99 a month.
“The Internet has no boundaries, no limits; I can just be me,” Rodman said.
In addition to eight in-house camera feeds, the site features dozens of archived photos from Rodman’s career. It also includes sports highlights and video footage courtesy of “Road Rage,” the traveling caravan that follows Rodman as he tours the country. And rest assured, there are plenty of naked women.
Rodman’s site is the first nonstrictly porn site powered by Wicked Interactive, the technology spinoff of adult film company Wicked Pictures.
“He’s controversial enough that people will or will not be interested in checking out what’s going on,” Wicked Interactive president Aaron Karacas said. “He has the power to (draw) attention to himself.”
Rodman hopes that membership revenue will keep the site financially sound. Roseanne is funding her site herself, so far, and puts the cost somewhere in the neighborhood of “an arm and a leg.”
But to her, the creative freedom is worth it.
“I’m never gonna do the same thing every day or every show,” she said. “People are so dead, and I think the Internet is going to wake everybody up - it has to.”