Nuke Fox Atomic Dot Com, Now

David Card | July 19, 2006, 08:17 AM

Attention News Corp., kill this idea quickly, before you blow serious money on it. If you must build out a young-adult-oriented movie-focused entertainment site, make it a MySpace channel, not the vanity project of your barely there yet studio, Fox Atomic. This is not a good idea. Aside from Disney and a very few others, movie studios have no brand recognition (outside of individual titles), and running an entertainment site -- and getting an actual audience to visit it -- is a full-time job.

Eight movies a year does not equal a "platform that's 24-7". An entertainment site would absolutely have to support movies from other studios, not "possibly" do so. If you need proof that a studio branded entertainment site is a bad strategy, consider this. Sony actively tries to drive traffic to its own movie sites under the Sony brand at a central Sony site. Disney and New Line do not.

Now executives at News Corp.'s newly unveiled, youth-oriented film label, Fox Atomic, are hoping to build a more-lasting online relationship with young moviegoers. To boost the label's movies, which will be geared entirely toward 17-to-24-year-olds, the company has developed a multifaceted Web site, foxatomic.com, that will feature not only promotions for Fox Atomic films but also written content and short-form video about a variety of other topics -- possibly even including films from other studios.