When the commercial history of the Internet is written, whose names will appear among the chief catalysts?
Beyond cybervisionaries such as America Online founder Steve Case, you could also make a powerful argument for including Pamela Anderson Lee, actress, chronic centerfold and star of what is now perhaps the world’s best-known home movie.
Ms. Lee, owing in part to a naughty self-made honeymoon video and its strange route onto the Web, owns the hottest name on the Internet. All across the Web, sites use the name of the former “”Baywatch”" star and estranged wife of rock drummer Tommy Lee to attract visitors to their pages. From Ms. Lee’s own official site to thousands of X-rated sites to random outposts like Expert Bathtub Liners, a plumbing-supply company in Ann Arbor, Mich., she’s the Web’s top drawing card.
By some calculations, there are more than 145,000 pages citing Ms. Lee — most of them hawking products or services. That works out to about 0.1% of the 150 million Web pages indexed by the AltaVista search engine, which is owned by Compaq Computer Corp. As a percentage, that doesn’t sound like much. But it is the equivalent of walking into the New York Public Library and finding that 13,300 of the volumes there are written about her.
Her name has become a brand to rival Coke or Pepsi; on the AltaVista search site alone, she gets about 9,000 queries on a typical day — or about 3.3 million searches a year. As Madonna’s cultivation of the music video once helped convince viewers that the MTV network was for real, the 31-year-old Ms. Lee — even if unwittingly — has done a huge amount to hammer home the viability of the Web as engine of commercial importance.
By Michael Tchong’s estimate, Ms. Lee’s GNP — or Gross Net Product, as it were — is about $77 million a year, though she herself, having lost control of her video in a tangled legal fight, gets very little of that. But counting legal and bootleg video sales, plus the unparalleled power of her name to draw Web surfers to legions of sites that use her as a come-on, “”there’s a ripple effect throughout the entire Internet economy,”" says Mr. Tchong, an Internet-marketing expert who runs Iconocast, a San Francisco market-information firm.
“”It’s amazing,”" says Martha Rogers, an Internet marketing consultant and former marketing professor, of Ms. Anderson’s Web allure. She jokes: “”I would have predicted Esther Dyson,”" referring to the New York technology guru.
Indeed, Ms. Lee’s astonishing digital popularity offers a dramatic testimony to the Internet’s woolly nature — how, as a new medium, it is both rewriting the book on celebrity and cashing in on it, all the while raising complex questions about the ability of notables to protect their names and images. With the rapid explosion of Web sites hawking everything from pornography to Bibles, competition for the attention of the world’s estimated 147 million Web users is fierce. Site creators spare no strategy to get noticed — and trading on famous names, which are queried relentlessly by Web surfers, is a key one.
“”You could say that the economy of the search engines, on which Wall Street has staked billions of dollars, is sort of based on this obsessive behavior,”" says Marita Sturken, a professor who studies popular culture at the University of Southern California.
And of all the famous names, none has been appropriated — or misappropriated — more than Ms. Lee’s. This, by a Web culture that, beyond its sex-obsessed nature, often gleefully flouts copyright laws and anoints its stars based on a shifting index of raw public interest rather any particular talent. A Canadian by birth, Ms. Lee has slowly mutated from buxomy beer-T-shirt model to repeat Playboy centerfold to B-level TV and movie actress, always trading on her Brigitte Bardot-like looks and sex appeal to get noticed. But it wasn’t until she married Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee in 1995 and apparently brought along a video camera to film their honeymoon sexual exploits that she managed to create a persona that has fused her to the Internet.
For Seth Warshavsky, a highly successful purveyor of Internet adult fare who acquired distribution rights to the video after a tangled legal battle, Ms. Lee’s allure is no mystery. “”She is as explicit and graphic as you can get while still being considered mainstream,”" he says.
Premiere Online, a cybermagazine, put it slightly gentler in a profile of the actress shortly before the release of her action-thriller megaflop called “”Barb Wire”": “”These are heady, hormone-rich times for Pamela Anderson Lee . . . the fantasy object launched from the pages of Playboy whose blond hair bleached the color of a klieg light, breathtakingly enhanced breasts and a Bardot-with-a-bullwhip persona have come to embody the ’90s bimbo.”"
Yet, it is a bizarre, often demeaning stardom that Ms. Lee seems now to regret; she declined to be interviewed for this article and, through her lawyer, says much of her exposure on the Web amounts to blatant illegal exploitation of her name that has become so widespread she is powerless to stop much of it.
“”It’s totally out of control,”" says Edward Masry, a Los Angeles attorney who represents the actress. “”People are violating copyrights and trademarks left and right.”"
For some, though, Ms. Lee’s story is a perfect parable for this tell-all, show-all cyberage: a parable of how risque or even reckless personal revelation driven by a thirst for celebrity can degenerate into commercial anarchy when it gets mixed into the hot fires of the Internet.
The tape first surfaced in 1996. It depicts the couple enjoying a variety of activities — fishing and camping, for example — but also engaging in explicit sex, most scenes of which appear to have been filmed by Ms. Lee herself. Despite speculation by some at the time that the tape was a publicity stunt, the Lees have maintained that the video was stolen from their home by construction workers.
Whatever the case, it found its way to Penthouse magazine, which published still frames of the sex scenes after the Lees lost a Los Angeles Superior Court challenge to gain an injunction to stop publication. Late in 1997, the tape fell into the hands of Mr. Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group, which announced plans to show the video to its adult-sites subscribers.
The Lees headed back to the superior court, and again failed to win a restraining order — in part because the judge said the couple had undermined their invasion-of-privacy claim by publicly discussing the tape’s contents on Howard Stern’s radio show. Internet Entertainment immediately broadcast the tape online, a move that placed the images in digital form and spawned thousands of copies that burned their way across the Internet.
The Lees then reached a settlement with Mr. Warshavsky’s company, terms of which weren’t disclosed. That settlement came back to haunt them when they tried to stop Internet Entertainment from selling mail-order copies of the tape. The Lees argued that the settlement covered only Internet dissemination of the video, not distribution of the tape. In November 1998, a federal judge dismissed that case, saying that the Lees had already signed away their rights. Whatever his original settlement with the Lees, it seems to have paid off for Mr. Warshavsky. He says Internet Entertainment has sold an estimated 300,000 copies at $34.95 each. That translates to $10 million in revenue.
For Ms. Lee, though, the cyber payoff seems to be relatively paltry while the downside seems numbing — a constant avalanche of unauthorized porn-site listings that use her name, often in sexually suggestive and derogatory ways, as a come on. She does have her own Web site, www.pamelaandersonlee.com., where annual memberships sell for $33.50 and include an autographed photo. She won’t discuss revenue or the number of subscribers, but the site, managed by her brother Gerry, has been unable to accept new memberships for several weeks; a site notice blames technical problems.
The debut offering: underwear, at $19.95 plus shipping and handling, designed by Ms. Lee. “”I’ve created the most amazing thong ever,”" she writes on the site. “”Girls — get this to wear for your man and guys, get it for your girl!”"
Over in the darker corners of cyberspace, however, scads of porn sites that link to Ms. Lee’s name, and even use her pictures and images, invite viewers to “”Watch Pam and Tommy”" do a variety of things not printable in this newspaper; in some cases, they even offer free peeks at short clips of the video. And, thanks to a quirk of Internet technology, many sites ride on Ms. Lee’s celebrity coattails without explicitly advertising the fact on their Web pages. Search for “”Pamela Anderson”" at a big search engine and you might stumble across “”Sex Circus Online,”" an adult site promising access to explicit photos and videos for $17.95 a month. But click onto the site and Ms. Lee’s name isn’t there.
This is because AltaVista, Excite and most other search engines decide how to index Web pages in part by examining invisible code words put there by a page’s author. These codes, called “”meta tags,”" are a way for a Web-site operator to suggest the best way of cataloging a site. The author of a Web page about cooking, for example, might include key words like “”cooking,”" “”culinary,”" and “”recipes”" among the meta tags.
But the creator of a Web page can list whatever they choose among the meta tags. And many choose to list “”Pamela Anderson Lee”" among the code words regardless of a site’s actual topic, knowing they can count on millions of people to search for those words.
The practice isn’t limited to adult sites. Tony Keene, an Ann Arbor, Mich., programmer who produced a Web page for Expert Bathtub Liners, says sticking Ms. Lee’s name in the hidden text is a well-known tactic for enticing visitors. (The site’s owner, however, says he plans to drop the reference.)
Mainstream sites are figuring out ways to profit from her, too. Consider those 9,000 daily searches for Ms. Lee’s name on AltaVista. On every page of search results, AltaVista displays a paid advertisement costing advertisers anywhere from two cents to 8.5 cents each time it is viewed. That means AltaVista — itself not in the sex business — could book $200,000 a year thanks to Ms. Lee.
This is hardly a fortune. But it is a scenario repeated countless times across the Web. Search for the word “”wine”" on Excite Inc.’s directory, for example, and a promotion appears atop the list of wine-related sites: “”Find Stars on Excite Movies: Pamela Anderson.”" Clicking on the link takes the user to an Excite page with a list of Ms. Lee’s films — and paid advertisements on top. Click on one of the films and up pops another page — and another ad.
In other words, when Excite successfully tempts a user looking for sites about wine or other unrelated topics into taking a detour into Pam-land, it distracts the user from leaving for a wine site and keeps the user within the borders of Excite to view paid advertising.
Is all of this really so different from traditional magazines using celebrity cover photos to drive newsstand sales or sidewalk vendors selling T-shirts with celebrities names and likenesses? Fundamentally, no. But as a matter of scale, absolutely. The ease of setting up shop in cyberspace has spawned new legions of entrepreneurs looking to cash in online. It is as if those sidewalk T-shirt vendors had suddenly been granted free access to the supply and distribution power of WalMart.
Ms. Lee isn’t totally powerless to stop this. Beyond copyright issues, which protect works of original creation, celebrities trying to combat misuse of their name or image often find themselves turning to a lesser-known protection: right-of-publicity laws. Laws governing publicity rights vary from state to state, but all share the same general principle. Individuals should have the ability to prevent others from using their names, voices or images to sell a product or service without permission.
All of those legal protections remain in full force in cyberspace. But having the law on your side isn’t enough. To benefit from those legal rights, celebrities must enforce them by tracking down violators, asking them to stop and, if necessary, bringing suit in court. Doing so has always required a substantial amount of work and resources for a celebrity hoping to guard the use of his or her name, but online, the task has become Herculean. That is forcing both celebrities and corporations alike to make tough decisions about how aggressively to pursue offenders.
“”You can’t go after everyone,”" says Jonathan Moskin, an attorney at Pennie & Edmonds, a New York City law firm that often represents businesses in Internet-rights disputes. “”It is simply too difficult to police.”"
Mr. Masry says he has fought a losing battle on Ms. Lee’s behalf. The attorney says he has sent out more than 100 cease-and-desist letters to specific Web sites, and in most cases, persuaded the sites to stop using Ms. Lee’s name and image. “”But the problem is, you close one up, they go next door and open up another one,”" Mr. Masry says.
That said, Ms. Lee, unlike Internet porn stars, continues to enjoy a mainstream Web appeal that seems surprisingly resilient in the wake of her pornographic overexposure on the Internet. At Mr. Showbiz, a popular Web site devoted to middle-of-the-road entertainment coverage, she consistently tops the lists of the site’s “”Sweet 16″” celebrities, besting even squeaky-clean serious actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow.
Erik Flannigan, managing editor of the Mr. Showbiz site, explains the paradox. Ms. Lee, he says, is a sort of living Barbie doll. “”And, yes, you can never have her. But you can see every inch of her anatomy.”"
(See related letter: “”Letters to the Editor: Romantic Poet Drawn Into Pamela’s Web”" — WSJ April 30, 1999)
Credit: Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal