Craig’s List & The Sims

Going from online to TV and even the silver screen: Craig's List and The Sims join the quest for omni-media-presence.

Most TV shows have their own website these days, but now, turning the tables, some websites are actually spawning their own TV shows. Case in point: Classmates.com, a website where school friends, lovers, prospective lovers and even enemies look to reacquaint themselves, recently got its own reality TV show, in cooperation with News Corp’s Twentieth Television. Each segment of the show will feature one person looking for a long lost acquaintance, old lover or kindergarten friend. The searchee won’t know who is trying to contact them, and the show will profile the people separately, leading up to their reunion. The business angle? Classmates.com’s 35 million registered users, who not only provide the show’s content (Classmates.com claims to generate about 300 to 500 possible story leads a day), but also represent a massive number of potential viewers and a source of ‘buzz’. Which is what all networks are after, anyway. Classmates is not the only one expanding from cyberspace to air waves: – Celebrity crime Web site The Smoking Gun is creating two half-hour shows for broadcast on cable channel Court TV (due to air in August), joining a genre of popular gotcha shows like ‘Cops’. The Smoking Gun was acquired by Court TV in 2000. – Sony Pictures Television is behind eBayTV, airing live auctions. Due to complications in getting software out to stations, the show’s launch has been postponed until fall 2004, but should be able to benefit from Ebay’s 1 trillion or so worshippers. – National Public Radio is working with Microsoft-owned online journal Slate on a one-hour weekday program called ‘Day to Day, which will feature news topics of the day. – iVillage, a popular women’s website with an online community of almost 15 million visitors, is planning a TV series based on internet dating. Tentatively named iDate, the program will follow internet based relationships starting with the initial email exchanges and culminating with the face-to-face meeting. (Sources: AdAge, News.com, TrendCentral.)

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