1. 04/04/2017 All the Celebrities You Want, on Your Cellphone The New York Times
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MEDIA
All the Celebrities You Want, on Your
Cellphone
By LAURA M. HOLSON OCT. 19, 2008
When Kim Kardashian, famous for being famous, sliced her foot on a piece of glass
in a New York hotel room in August, the gossip Web site TMZ.com alerted fans over
their cellphones. Traffic to the site jumped 10 percent within minutes.
Ms. Kardashian also outranked her friendturnedrival, Paris Hilton, as the
mostsearched celebrity in August on Yahoo’s mobile service (traffic surged after she
danced with the Pussycat Dolls in Las Vegas).
Best known for a sex tape made with her boyfriend, Ms. Kardashian has
achieved something on the smallest screen that has eluded her in her television
career: an adoring audience. Can other wouldbe celebrities be far behind?
Celebrity gossip has long been a profitable staple of print, radio and television.
More recently, it has made Web sites like Popsugar.com and PerezHilton.com some
of the more popular destinations. But in recent months, as consumers started
snapping up Webenabled smartphones like the iPhone, the cellphone has become
the latest medium to feed the appetite for uptothesecond celebrity gossip.
TMZ.com started a mobile offering last April and watched traffic soar there to 1.1
million visitors in July, eclipsing the mobile audience of People.com, the Web site of
the pop culture magazine, according to Nielsen Mobile, which tracks mobile sites.
People.com, which charges $3.99 to access fashion photos and celebrity videos
through various wireless carriers, recognized the shift in behavior and is changing its
2. 04/04/2017 All the Celebrities You Want, on Your Cellphone The New York Times
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approach. It is building a free, adsupported service to be introduced in November.
E!, the entertainment news cable channel and Web site, also offers celebrity
news for cellphone users. This year, it began offering text and alerts and has already
signed up 30,000 subscribers, sending them as many as three alerts a day. And, in a
new twist, E! broadcast live to mobile phones from the red carpet at the primetime
Emmy Awards in September.
Celebrity news everywhere and all the time is a natural evolution as technology
makes it easier and cheaper to access media on smartphones. But at the same time,
with even politics taking on the air of a reality television show — Sarah Palin came in
No. 9 among Yahoo’s mobile celebrity searches soon after she was named the
Republican vice presidential candidate, according to Yahoo — executives in the
industry expect that smartphones will become fundamental in the proliferation of
celebrity gossip.
“We are all going to be walking television stations,” said Jeff Sellinger, the
general manager for CBS Mobile, which sends out three daily reports on celebrity
parties and red carpet premieres in and around Los Angeles. “In the next wave, the
nottoodistant future, we are going to be able to broadcast anything live from the
street.”
One of the most popular mobile sites for celebrity news is Yahoo Entertainment,
which recently had 2.9 million visitors, according to Nielsen. Lee Ott, global director
of Yahoo’s mobile search strategy and services, said that 4 out of every 10 people
used oneSearch, Yahoo’s mobile service, to find entertainment and celebrity news.
By contrast, Yahoo Sports had 2 million visitors and Yahoo Finance had 1.5 million,
Nielsen reported. Such services are at the intersection of two powerful demographic
trends: the young are entertainment obsessed, and they are addicted to their mobile
phones.
But the audience is already starting to tend closer to middle age. Verizon
Wireless estimates that two years ago, mobile content was consumed mostly by
cellphone users older than 25 years old. Today that figure is more like 34 years old.
“People are getting more adept at using their phones, which too are getting better,”
3. 04/04/2017 All the Celebrities You Want, on Your Cellphone The New York Times
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said John Harrobin, senior vice president for Verizon’s digital media marketing at
Verizon Wireless.
The increasing proliferation of smartphones is what encouraged executives at
People.com to amend their approach to celebrity news.
For years, consumers have been paying $3.99 to download People’s mobile
application through Verizon Wireless and other carriers, which was available only on
conventional mobile phones. But as smartphones, with their faster connections and
improved graphics, became more popular, particularly among women, People.com
explored the idea this year of retooling its Web site to make it more user friendly for
owners of BlackBerrys and iPhones. People, like several news organizations,
including its rival E!, is creating a specific application for the iPhone dedicated to
celebrity news.
“What we hear from women is that they go online for news and they are very
interested in celebrities. We want to tap into that,” said Fran Hauser, president of
People Digital.
Studies conducted by researchers for People found that 30 percent of magazine
readers now use their mobile phone to access People.com. (Headlines and celebrity
photographs are the most popular items.)
Most important, though, accessing the new mobile site is free, which People
executives hope will mean more traffic for People.com, allowing it to charge more for
ads. When it retools the Web site for a mobile audience, People will add a function
that places banner ads at the top and bottom of the cellphone screen when pages are
accessed on a palmsize device.
People.com’s mobile site had 771,000 visitors recently, said Nielsen, lower than
rivals like E! Online whose mobile site attracted 1.2 million visitors.
“We are getting past the early adopters and attracting a more mainstream
audience,” said John Najarian, executive vice president for digital media and
business development for the Comcast Entertainment Group, the division of
Comcast that owns E!
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Despite the focus now on young, rich and outrageous personalities, everyone
will be fair game in the future. Celebrities like Tom Hanks and Bono have
successfully guarded their private lives. But protecting quiet moments will be harder
going forward, say talent agents, as the growing number of highquality cameras
makes everyone a potential paparazzo.
“The talent who tries to keep their lives private will have to do it more so,” said
Lewis Henderson, a senior vice president for digital media at William Morris. “You
can go live right now,” he added, referring to videoenabled phones which make it
easy to upload fresh clips to the Internet. “It’s the world we live in and it brings new
challenges,” he said. “You can’t tell clients to stay inside.”
It could get even worse for them, thanks to new services for the cellphone.
Seesmic, a video blogging company based in San Francisco, is planning to begin a
service where cellphone users can record a video of a celebrity at dinner or in a
conversation, then send it to the Internet so that it can be discussed among friends
in Seesmic’s network.
As more mobile phones have locationtracking abilities, spreading the news of
celebrity sightings, supplemented with a photo or video upload, cannot be far off. “I
think we will have to be very careful,” said Loïc Le Meur, chief executive of Seesmic.
“Some people will love following celebrities around.”
But then some, like Ms. Kardashian, might not mind so much. (In a worlds
colliding moment, she discussed her wounded foot days later on the red carpet at a
party in Los Angeles for the pink BlackBerry Curve.) Said Mr. Henderson, the
William Morris executive, “For those clients who want to exploit themselves, it gives
them so much more opportunity.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: All the
Celebrities You Want, on Your Cellphone.
© 2017 The New York Times Company
