Los Angeles — Microsoft Corp’s Web portal MSN on Thursday embarked on a crowded field of online entertainment and celebrity news , taking the wraps off a new website known as Wonderwall.com, a scrolling wall of star photos and news meant to give users the feel of flipping through a celebrity magazine.
Microsoft partnered on the project in a joint venture with entertainment bigwigs BermanBraun Interactive, a media company based in Santa Monica, California, to create a new entertainment and celebrity news site called Wonderwall for MSN, the Internet arm of the US software giant. “As long as MSN.com has been around, we have had an entertainment channel,” said Rob Bennett, MSN general manager. But people had a hard time finding celebrity news and gossip among the existing Music, TV and Movies channels. “Celebrity content is sort of sprinkled throughout.”
MSN hopes Wonderwall will encourage users to spend more time on the site than they have elsewhere on the Web portal, and that it will allow novel approaches to advertising.
“Wonderwall offers people an absorbing and visually dynamic perspective on the day’s hottest pop culture stories, personalities and trends,” MSN and BermanBraun said in a statement.
The major characheristic of Wonderwall.com is a nearly full-screen wall of pictures with links to stories, photo galleries and video. These walls can be scrolled horizontally, an experience MSN and BermanBraun likened to “flipping through a favorite magazine.”
Visually: “This site really makes use of the screen real estate. It uses large, beautiful photography, creates great, rich slide shows, video within the experience itself,” Bennett said. Wonderwall will try to “decommoditize” the stream of celebrity images available from providers such as WireImage by packaging it in interesting ways and applying a unique "spin and voice" on top of it.
Editorially: “The site will apply a balance between the “catty, snarky almost to the point of disrespectful” tone of TMZ, Defamer and PerezHilton on one end, and the “puff piece, always-positive on celebrities” tone of sites such as People.com,” he said.
The site features a feed of the latest celebrity news and categories such as “Top Celebs” and “LOL Pics,” the “funniest photos of celebs from around the Web.”
Boosting Web advertising has been a challenge for Internet companies, with advertisers paying much less per spot than they do on television.
Bennett said the site marks a departure from older advertising models borrowed from TV that revolve around video ads.
“I think the industry, at large, sort of stayed in that mode for probably too long, and I think we could have pushed the innovation more to take advantage of the benefits of the online medium,” Bennett said.
Wonderwall competes against numerous celebrity news sites, including TMZ.com which is a joint venture of Telepicture Productions and AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc.