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to boob-tube erotica
Can the arty sex site pull off a TV series on HBO?
By Gabriel Spitzer
Erotica has always had its place in society, and for a long time it was under the counter, wrapped in brown paper.
That began changing 50 years ago when Playboy won a place on newsstands among such titles as Time, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. True erotica it was not, but it hinted at the possibilities.
Everything changed forever several years ago when Nerve launched on the web to offer surfers what it cheekily called "literary smut," true erotica in well-crafted stories of sexual encounters and arty photos of the human body in its starkest beauty.
The question these days is whether erotica as a form can be moved off the page to the television screen.
Nerve founder Rufus Griscom thinks it can be done--and that HBO can do it. Nerve, which has expanded to include a print title, films and a radio webcast, along with book publishing, is developing a pilot with HBO for a television series.
Griscom is tight-lipped about the show’s specifics. In vaguest terms he describes it as "a TV hallucination of the print magazine. It will include animation, reality clips from the office, and a broad range in between."
Griscom will not say when the show might eventually air. He won't even say when work begins on the pilot.
The television show was officially announced last week at a gala New York City party, where HBO cameras captured the typical things people have come to expect of any Nerve party: "your everyday sex maniacs…a fluorescent pink exhibitionist booth beaming its antics onto a 12 ft. digital screen, sexy Nerve Nudes adorning the walls, and near-naked people performing feats of athletic daring."
But media people are divided over whether Griscom can pull off a TV show, even working with HBO.
Just because something works in one medium does not ensure it will work across all media.
Greg Smith, managing director for Carat Interactive, says what matters is brand, and he thinks Nerve has the power of brand to pull it off.
"Many content sites confuse the brand and the product," says Smith. "I once told a client, if you were going to do a TV show based on your magazine, it wouldn’t be a guy sitting there in front of the camera reading the magazine."
"It makes sense for something like Nerve; it’s about the brand, not about the medium. If you’re smart about it, you can translate it to other media."
Others are more skeptical.
"Forget the web for a moment. It’s very hard to be in print and to launch yourself into TV. Just because you have good content on one platform doesn’t mean it will work on others," says David Smith, president of Mediasmith, an interactive agency based in San Francisco.
"That’s expansion from one area to another that maybe they don't belong in. What’s [Nerve’s] platform for being on the radar for the medium that they’re in, and who’s to say they can succeed in other media? It’s a very long shot."
If generally there seems to be a lot of cynicism these days about such media crossovers, it should come as no surprise, these being times of post-dot.com crash remorse.
Just a year ago such things became all the rage when it became apparent that all the new, heavily-funded web sites that were expecting to make a killing from online advertising were fast headed for extinction.
The thinking went: Well, we aren't selling ads but we have this content the venture capitals paid so handsomely for, so it only makes sense to peddle our unique offerings across other media where ad dollars are plentiful.
Less often spoken, of course, was the caveat: It's either that or we file for bankruptcy. Thus began a dizzying period of cross-platform talk and bankruptcy filings.
Griscom says Nerve's move to television is a logical extension of the brand. Panic plays no role.
"I think what sets us apart from most content entities is that we started as a media company," says Griscom.
"We came from off-line media, from book publishing. It was always part of our business plan. We found back in 1997 that there was little online content of high enough caliber to be in a book or a magazine."
Nerve’s magazine, now a year old, circulates to about 70,000 readers, complementing the site’s traffic of about 35 million page views and one million unique visitors per month.
Griscom says what separates Nerve from most web-to-offline ventures is its good sense about knowing when to turn to professionals.
"We’re not creating the TV show, we’re creating it with HBO. We have an appropriate amount of humility about finding the best people in the business to create the best possible product," says Griscom.
"We’ve done books with Doubleday and Random House. We’re doing our first film with Miramax and our second with Revolution Studios."
Nerve’s multimedia strategy starts with a readership that is, from an advertiser’s point of view, eminently attractive: 81 percent of Nerve readers have a college degree, and a full third have a graduate degree. Nerve readers’ average household income is $70,000, and they spend big money on media and entertainment.
Perhaps most surprisingly, Nerve’s readership is 40 percent female—not bad for a market overwhelmingly dominated by men.
"You’d never see anything close to that for a Playboy product," says Griscom.
"And the younger the age bracket, the more women there are. I think that statistic really nails what’s happening here. Our 18-25 bracket is about 70 percent women."
The problem then becomes: how do you leverage those demographics into money?
"It’s taken us a long time to figure out ways to generate revenue and real business from those readers. We’re not going to make too much from the online magazine, but we can make money, for example, from our online personals, or from selling our other products to our readers," says Griscom.
June 14, 2001
© 2001 Media Life
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