Celebnet, more reading material for the celebrity-obsessed
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(OOPS: We originally said Buzznet had acquired Absolute Funk. Though that is a cool name, the blog is actually Absolute Punk.)
An interest in the goings-on of A-list, B-list and even C-list celebrities can be quite the time-consuming hobby. Stop paying attention for one day and you’ll miss the latest news about Heidi and Spencer (gasp!) or the latest fashion faux pas of LiLo (double gasp!). If you know who any of the aforementioned people are, and check up on them daily, you’re the target audience of the people behind Celebuzz, a site launching Tuesday that claims to be Wikipedia-meets-People, for everything celebrity.
Celebuzz is the latest venture of Buzznet, the Los Angeles-based company that runs the popular (more than 10 million users) music social networking site of the same name. Buzznet has been on a tear lately, attracting $25 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures and Universal Music.
Buzznet has been gobbling up music sites too, including Absolute Punk, Idolator and FriendsOrEnemies, which is where Pete Wentz, who apparently leads a band called Fall Out Boy, announced...
... that wife Ashlee Simpson was pregnant.
Why would Buzznet deviate from music-related social media sites? Because its founders know that the celebrity-obsessed are, well, obsessed. Or, in the words of Karina Kogan, the general manager of celebrity for BuzzNet, there is “hyper-consumption” in the celebrity space.
“We found that typically consumers of celebrity media will visit more than one site, buy more than one magazine,” Kogan said. “People will read the same exact story five times -- they want as much information as they can possibly get.”
That means people could go back to Celebuzz again and again, which would of course make the site’s advertisers happy. Celebuzz will also have a healthy dose of product placement, sponsorships and advertorials.
Between ads, staff writers will wax poetic about all things celebrity, as will bloggers, readers, paparazzi, experts (in this case, that often means stylists) and even the celebs themselves. Partners include popular fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, paparazzi agency Pacific Coast News and celebrity blog A Socialite’s Life.
Kogan says Celebuzz will be different from the gazillion other celebrity-focused sites because it has contributors from so many different parts of the celebrity ecosystem: snarky bloggers, obsessed readers, pushy paparazzi and cranky celebrities. She says it pulls info from dozens of celebrity sites, but ‘goes deeper, satiating the hunger we know exists.’
What exactly does ‘deeper’ means on a site devoted to celebrity, which is often focused on things only skin deep? Whole sections devoted to Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus and other ‘hot’ celebrities, along with lists of all the people they’ve dated, divorced, ‘shacked up’ or ‘hooked up’ with (am I the only person who thinks it is bizarre that, according to Celebuzz, Cher and Tom Cruise once dated?).
There’s also a feature that tracks the short histories of celebrity couples. The content in that alone will probably change enough to ensure constant Web traffic, not to mention material for the celebrity-obsessed.
-- Alana Semuels
Semuels, a Times staff writer, covers marketing and the L.A. tech scene.
