EISNER—Eisner Web Venture Sinks, Heads Offline

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Romp.com, the bawdy Web brainchild of Michael Eisner’s son, Eric, has effectively shut down, its founders choosing to focus instead on traditional media projects, including developing an animated feature film and magazine.

“We’ve decided it’s time to graduate from the Internet and move on to a channel in entertainment where we can actually make money,” said Romp co-CEO Bruce Forman, a former Goldman Sachs & Co. executive. “In the year we’ve been online, we’ve managed to create a strong brand and made a loyal audience between 16 and 30 (year-olds), and have been unable to make money off it. We’ll take our act to a new stage.”

Specifically, the two partners and their eight co-workers are making a 70-minute animated film based on their most popular Web show, “Booty Call.” Funded by remaining capital from an undisclosed group of investors, the feature film is set for shooting this year and a spring or fall 2002 release, Forman said. No distribution or animation partner deals have been made yet.

Eisner and Forman also are preparing to launch a quarterly magazine in partnership with Bannockburn, Ill.-based H & S; Media Inc. to develop new characters around “Booty Call,” he said. The magazine is tentatively slated to be on racks by the beginning of 2002.

As for the Romp.com Web site, in less than a year it amassed a cult following among the college fraternity crowd, drawn by the site’s semi-pornographic offerings and its controversial characters.

Like his father, Walt Disney Co. chief Michael Eisner, who pulled the plug on Disney’s Internet group earlier this year, Eric Eisner found the reality of online entertainment too difficult to make a profit on.

After less than two months, Romp.com cancelled a subscription program that had allowed site visitors to log on for online videos and shows previously offered for free.

But Eisner and Forman’s company, The Romp Inc., is far from gone.

Forman said that Romp.com’s target audience will be more inclined to buy magazines, movie tickets or pre-released DVDs than they were to buy Internet subscriptions. But that still may not be enough to make Romp a financially viable venture.

“They do have one ingredient: a loyal following and targeted audience,” said Michael Ferrera, Internet analyst at Reston, Va.-based comScore Networks Inc. “Whether this crowd will make the leap from online to off-line remains to be seen.”

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