Icebox.com is the latest, and most surprising, casualty of the online entertainment world. After 14 months, $15 million and plenty of media attention, Icebox canceled future production on its 22 “Webisode” shows last week, selling off its furniture, and laying off all but two employees.
“We got there either too early or too late,” says Icebox CEO Steve Stanford, taking a break from the tortilla chips and ginger ale at the company’s farewell party. “If we’d started off with this idea earlier, we could have made out in the initial Internet IPO market. And if we’d been able to hold out for longer, we would’ve eventually become profitable. One day, this stuff will be a thriving industry.”
At the moment, however, online entertainment is tanking. The Icebox meltdown follows a six-month string of entertainment site closings, including Steven Spielberg’s Pop.com and the Digital Entertainment Network. When Icebox launched, the company’s founders envisioned a site that would provide offbeat alternatives to the formulaic fare of prime-time programming and give writers a chance to experiment. “No one here was saying ‘OK, it’s 8 p.m., the show needs to have a family in it,” says Stanford. “We were committed to the creative freedom of the artist.”
That commitment resulted in some controversial programming. In addition to “Queer Duck,” the Icebox lineup included “The Adventures of Jesus and His Brothers,” which explored sibling rivalry between sons of God, and “Mr. Wong,” which featured a subservient Asian houseboy with a thick accent and yellow skin. While some Asian-Americans, including the two that helped produce the show, saw “Mr. Wong” as a clever mockery of an appalling stereotype, many were not amused. The Organization of Chinese Americans and other advocacy groups fired off hundreds of e-mails to Icebox, calling the show offensive and demanding it be canceled.
Although shows offended some audiences, Icebox’s writers relished the freedom. “We called all the best television writers we knew and said ‘What’s that show you’ve always wanted to do?” says Rob LaZebnik, who worked as executive producer of “The Simpsons” before launching Icebox with Stanford and two fellow writers, John Collier of “The X-Files” and Howard Gordon of “King of the Hill.”
Instead of tempting writers with cash, Icebox offered them stock in the company. The pitch worked. After just a few calls, the list of contributors included top writers from shows such as “Seinfeld,” “South Park,” “Felicity” and “Party of Five.”
But all that was back in the days of the Internet gold rush, when “stock options” and “Internet venture” were enchanted words that held infinite possibilities. As the capital market dried up, Icebox and other Web sites that offered animation shorts-such as Shockwave.com, Entertaindom and Ifilms-were hit hard with the pesky little question of how to actually make money.
While producing animation for the Web costs a lot less than creating television shows, it’s not exactly cheap. Every minute of animation programming costs between $3,000 and $15,000 to produce. The people behind Icebox and the other entertainment sites believed television viewers would soon toss aside their remotes and come home to kick back in front of their PCs. But as it turned out, consumers have been slower to transfer their viewing habits from television to the Web.
Icebox drew about 650,000 unique visitors to the site each month. That wasn’t too shabby, but it’s paltry compared to “Survivor,” which draws nearly 30 million viewers on a typical Thursday night. With well under a million unique users a month, Icebox was hardly inundated with advertising money.
Eventually, Icebox’s CEO was unable to raise the $10 million he needed make it through the start-up period. “In the near term, the business models for online content don’t work really well,” Stanford said. “But I honestly think they will in the long term.”
As for Queer Duck’s future, he may show up on another site. Shockwave.com, one of Icebox’s chief competitors in online animation, is a likely buyer. One of that site’s most popular cartoons is the self-explanatory “Frog In a Blender,” which lets users click buttons to control the power level of a frog milkshake. Maybe Shockwave will combine the two for a new Web cartoon series. They could call it “Duck Soup.”
