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June 16, 2000 VOL. 29 NO. 23 | SEARCH ASIAWEEK
Asia's celebrities find new roles on the Internet. Can star-crazed groupies create profits? By ALEXANDRA A. SENO and MARIA CHENG A soccer player knows about spin control, and Japanese superstar Nakata Hidetoshi was displeased with the bad bounces his locker-room remarks were taking in the press. Sports reporters spelled his name right, but the reclusive midfielder says he experienced "feelings of frustration" because his statements were seldom faithfully reproduced by newspapers and magazines. Having just acquired a laptop computer and an e-mail account, the wildly popular Nakata quickly deduced he didn't really need all those pushy scribes standing between himself and his fans anyway. The media could be disintermediated. Cut from the loop. Nakata nearly two years ago opened his own website to communicate directly with his followers. "The fact that I am able to talk to readers of the website without having anyone filter my writing is very satisfying," says Nakata in an interview conducted via the Internet. "Many times it can be lonely to be an athlete, but through the mail I feel I am not alone. I feel like my fans are practically my real friends." One nice thing about having pals is you can cadge a few bucks from them sometimes. Because his fansite draws a huge crowd, second in Japan only to the official PlayStation 2 site, Nakata's management company recently launched another. Club.nakata.net charges $4.67 a month for access to exclusive chat rooms and video clips of Our Hero at home in Italy, where he plays for the AS Roma team. "The sites are a way for Nakata to show his gratitude to his fans," says Fujita Mina, his business manager. "This way, they have more access to him than the press does." The relationship between the famous, their ardent devotees and the media has always been a bit twisted, in a co-dependent, mutually exploitative way. People need role models and fantasy lovers; celebrities need adulation, publicity and a topped-up net worth; the media have deadlines, bottom lines and paparazzi who need targets to stalk. Now technology has been thrown into this incestuous menage-a-trois. The Internet, and the celebrity-backed website, is changing the fan experience through the virtual medium's immediacy and one-to-one interaction.
As Asians increasingly get wired, the region's superstars are rapidly moving their publicity campaigns online. In recent weeks, Hong Kong actor Ekin Cheng and Taiwan-born sex goddess Shu Qi have announced official websites. International superstar Jackie Chan will soon weigh in. STAREASTnet.com, a publicly traded Hong Kong-based entertainment company partly owned by Chan, has signed more than 150 leading and lesser lights to set up their Webquarters. In the month since the launch of www.leonstareastnet.com, Internet home of film actor and singer Leon Lai Ming, the site has recorded 2.8 million page views, more than 800,000 a day on average. One of Hong Kong's most successful portals, Hongkong.com, gets 3.2 million views a day. The Asian fansite is, in fact, proving to be one of the most powerful online draws in the region. "The Internet and Asian celebrities combine in one of those magic combinations that we're seeing work here more than anywhere else in the world," says Matthew McGarvey, regional Internet analyst with international technology consultants IDC in Hong Kong. "People here follow the pop scene to an unbelievable and extreme extent." Ex-Davis Cup tennis player Mark Ferreira, business development director at soon-to-launch athletes portal SportsNetGlobal.com, says Asians tend to identify strongly with celebrities because societies are stratified and static. "It is tough for people to move up, so many ordinary people associate all their dreams with stars," he says. Michael Bolanos, chief executive of New York-based Entertainment Drive, host to official sites for supermodel Cindy Crawford and teen diva Britney Spears, offers a metaphysical explanation: "Entertainment is our planet's expression of creativity and communication, and our entertainers are our guides." Most Asian celebrities have been rather tardy as IT trailblazers. The huddled masses, not the elite, discovered the electronic fan club. In 1985, the most popular computer bulletin board on San Francisco's WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), an Internet precursor, was an online community for followers of The Grateful Dead rock band. The Deadhead's pioneering board was a decidedly uncommercial venture, as are most of the hundreds of amateur webpages that worshippers have erected as monuments to their idols.
Today, it is not love but money that is driving Asian artists online. Official fansites -- those sponsored or endorsed by the celebrity to which the site is dedicated -- allow artists a degree of self-promotion and image management unachievable through traditional media. Bolanos says most include a "for the record" feature in which stars break their own news and correct inaccurate information printed elsewhere. Computer servers store the little details of a celebrity's life -- the wholesome ones, at any rate -- in depth that is satisfying to devotees. Fan e-mail can provide a personal brush with fame that some find exhilarating. A sample exchange from the site of Chinese martial arts king and Hollywood hunk Jet Li: Tiffany: Your captivating performance in Lethal Weapon 4 was my first observance of you in a film. I became an instant fan. Your martial arts skills were breathtaking, but even more outstanding was your acting ability. What is the most challenging scene that you had to perform? Li: My biggest challenges in filming have always centered on personal injury. Li says he enjoys the online give-and-take and uses the message boards to guide career moves. "When you are successful, people around you only tell you good things," he says, "but I need to know the truth." The public pulls fewer punches than cocktail party toadies. "They tell me what kind of movie to be in and what they think of my work." Li says message-board feedback encouraged him to negotiate for a role in the planned sequel to the blockbuster film The Matrix. The Web is also a useful device to attract attention globally. Tata Young, one of Thailand's most popular singers, is due to announce an international recording contract with a major label, and there will be a website to match. "People know me in Thailand but [with the site] anyone even in America can join my fan club and see what Tata Young is doing," she says. On occasion, the Internet has even turned no-names into minor celebs. South Korean lingerie model Lee Sung Hi became a sensation after scores of independent Web pages began featuring scantily-clad images of her. The grassroots buzz got her assignments to pose for Playboy magazine, she wrote a best-selling autobiography, began a movie career (That Summer in L.A.) and now has an adult members-only site that charges $10 a month for access.
Beyond being useful for promotion and spin control, fansites also present obvious e-commerce opportunities. Celebrities who partner with dotcom companies reportedly receive as much as a 50% cut of the profit produced from related online sales. Chinese Books Cyberstore, which is launching fansites for Ekin Cheng and Shu Qi, expects the stars to generate traffic as well as receipts. Says Alice Leung, the Hong Kong dotcom's senior vice president: "Ekin loves comics, so he will lead online discussion groups on his favorite ones. Fans will click on his site somewhere if they want to purchase them. Since Ekin likes to play computer games and has all kinds of gadgets, this will influence the type of e-commerce that goes on in his website." Attractive studs and sexy hussies can hawk chunks of cyberspace as well as soap and beer. Internet ventures struggling to rise above the noise increasingly seek associations with celebrities for their drawing power. "Stars are 'sticky,' " says McGarvey of IDC -- they attract and keep audiences. Adds David Dennis, CEO of AsiaWorld Online: "With celebrities there is always something new going on in their lives, so people will always have a new reason to go on our sites. Glitzy, lovely young things have done well for us." Hence Chinese Books Cyberstore plans to bid for the coveted youth market by setting up the official site for glitzy, lovely Shu Qi. As a "value-added service," says Leung, the former porn star turned legitimate actress has agreed to conduct literary discussion groups. Presumably she will keep her clothes on. "Shu Qi actually fits into the Chinese bookstore website quite well because she reads a lot of Chinese literature," Leung says. That's news to the star of the movie Sex and Zen II. "I've never read anything that difficult," says Shu. "I don't really read literature." She plans to lead the group in more personally interesting directions. "I'll discuss fashion, among other things." STAREASTnet.com, the Hong Kong entertainment portal, is basing its entire business on star power. The company is linked to Star East Holdings, a movie and TV production house, and Chairman Alan Tam -- himself a Hong Kong recording artist -- has put together website deals with more than 150 artists from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. The portal plans online auctions of celebrity memorabilia and an electronic shopping mall. Investors seem mildly intrigued by the synergy between stars and shopping. The stock of STAREASTnet.com recorded a 5.9% gain on June 1, its first day of trading on the Hong Kong market. Whether fansites can turn profits remains to be seen. "There is a difference between a successful business venture and a high-profile venture," says Sohaib Umar, regional Internet analyst at brokerage CLSA Emerging Markets. Overhead can be high. Some 70 people are employed to maintain graphics and games on Leon Lai's site, for example. STAREASTnet foots the bill, but other celebrities such as Nakata fund their own Web ventures. They are looking for corporate sponsorships, advertising and paid memberships. And costs go beyond the monetary. The eternal celebrity balancing act between publicity and privacy extends to the Web as well. Sharon Cuneta, a Philippine TV, movie and singing star, was overwhelmed by the demands of responding to fan e-mail, letters which some days numbered more than 1,000 and which were sometimes intrusive. "We had to shut down the function that allowed fans to write to me," says Cuneta. Top-ranked Indian tennis player Mahesh Bhupathi expects trade-offs when he goes online soon through SportsNetGlobal.com. "My job is to play tennis well," he says, "but without fans there is no tennis, and the site is a way to get to the public." Eventually, the sheer number of fansites may threaten their viability through overexposure and over-commercialization. "A lot of websites use celebrities as a kind of brand name," says Ng Chun-hung, a sociology department lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. "They need something to attract people for a first look. People may feel in the beginning that they are getting closer to the stars, but as they're exposed more and more to this environment, they will realize this isn't the case," says Ng. "After they get used to seeing celebrities on the Web, it won't have the same attraction it does now." Stars may burn brightly on the Internet. They are all destined to burn out just the same. With reporting by YULANDA CHUNG Hong Kong Write to Asiaweek at mail@web.asiaweek.com
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