Is the Internet ready for a theme park?
That's what Warner Bros. Online is serving up as it launches the most ambitious effort by a Hollywood studio yet to make the Web into a profitable business.
Entertaindom includes Warner Bros. entertainment for every taste: original animation shorts, Loony Tunes cartoons on demand, multipath Superman movies, and lots and lots of good old-fashioned merchandising.
"It's an entertainment cul-de-sac," said Warner Bros. Online president Jim Moloshok. "It's everything you want localized in one place."
Moloshok envisions revenue coming from three sources: e-commerce, advertising, and microtransactions, such as paying a quarter to view a Loony Tunes cartoon.
While he won't say when Entertaindom will be profitable, Moloshok is emphatic that the site is for profit, not just an exercise in showing the studio's Internet muscle.
"We definitely do have a business model," he said. "All I can say is that we'll make a profit sooner than Amazon."
Moloshok declined to predict when the site would be profitable or how much the studio is investing in it. But he noted that Warner Bros. Online's existing Web effort, Acme City, is profitable.
Analyst Joe Butt of Forrester Research gives Warner Bros. high marks for doing more than any studio to date to make the Internet a viable business, he said the jury is still out on whether Entertaindom is really the future of entertainment on the Web.
"It makes business sense, but we'll have to see how it works from an entertainment sense," he said. "Until now, it's been hard to make money luring people to an entertainment destination site."
The most successful sites, he noted, have had easy-to-understand focuses: selling CDs or online music downloads.
