New e-commerce site melds Hollywood, social networks, multi-level marketing
Hollywood and Amway don’t usually fit into the same sentence. But Hollywood insider Dan Adler has created a new e-commerce site called Fanista.com that will sell music, movies, books and other entertainment content, with financial backing from Alticor, the parent company of multi-level marketing firm Amway.
Visitors to the site will be able to create personal profiles and write reviews, as well as to buy products. And they will have a financial incentive to encourage friends to use the site. If Ann recruits Barbara and Barbara makes a purchase on Fanista, Ann will get a 5% commission on the sale. And if Barbara recruits Kevin and Kevin makes a purchase, both Barbara and Ann will get 5% commissions. That’s similar to the Amway model in which sellers of the company’s home and beauty products get commissions from sales of friends they recruit to sell for Amway.
But Adler is more excited about the social networking aspects of the site, which he hopes will make shopping at Fanista more like the experience of walking into an independent record store where the person behind the counter had strong opinions about the music for sale. “Fanista is an attempt to move that magic back online,” Adler says. “That magic disappeared when we had fewer of those kinds of stores and fewer of those kinds of voices, the person who could tell us something because they really believed in it.”
And Adler’s entertainment industry connections could make the interactions on the site more exciting, as he plans to draw artists he knows to share their own views on music, movies and books. Among those who already has posted reviews to the site, Adler says, is George Gallo, write of such movies as Bad Boys, Midnight Run and Zodiac. There will be more recognizable names on the site soon, he says. “It’s a pretty good list and a broad list of people across different genres,” he says.
Several hundred people connected to the company have been testing the site for about a month as it was being built, and the company publicly announced that the site is live in beta mode this week. As of now, consumers can buy CDs and DVDs on the site, and video games will be available this month, Adler says. Digital downloads will be live by the end of the year and books in 2008.
Adler, whose holiday career includes stints at talent agency Creative Artists Agency and at The Walt Disney Company, was introduced to Alticor through television producer Norman Lear and his business partner. While Adler agrees that Alticor does not seem like a likely choice to bankroll an entertainment-oriented web site, he says it’s the perfect choice because Alticor has no aspirations to become a movie studio or a record label. “We felt it was important to have that neutrality,” he says, “to work with someone who doesn’t have a horse in the race when it came to entertainment.”
Although Alticor is the sole investor, Fanista.com is an independent, privately held company based in Beverly Hills, CA. Adler declined to elaborate on the financing of the company, other than to say he is a part owner.
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