HispanicBusiness

Is the Rated-R Web site of the Queen of All Media about to go PG?

A spokesman for the notoriously snarky Perez Hilton, ranked as the world's No. 1 Web star by Forbes Magazine, announced this week that the blogger will be launching a less raunchy Web site this August in hopes of attracting more big-dollar advertisements.

Will it work? And will it actually happen? Seems hard to believe. After all, Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, certainly didn't get to where he is by refraining from his proclivity to use the B-word, uncover ribald scoops about celebrities and defile the glitzy photos of the Hollywood glitterati by drawing silly doodles over their private parts.

And let's face it, few can do "juvenile" as deftly as Hilton. In February alone, PerezHilton.com attracted 2.2 million users, according to Internet tracking firm comScore.com.

Toning down the site might be akin to the idea of a "compassionate Howard Stern," or a "politically correct Rush Limbaugh" -- in other words, a complete disaster, at least from a business perspective. To use a phrase Hilton himself might appreciate, he might be on the path to a painful self-neutering.

Or maybe there's more to the story. It's difficult to say, because the man who went public with the news, Henry Copeland -- founder and CEO of BlogAds.com, which handles Hilton's operations and ad sales -- is being cagey.

During a panel discussion at the OMMA Publishing conference Wednesday, Copeland revealed a few intriguing details, but not much more. The site, he said, will feature longer stories and make an attempt to appeal to larger advertisers. What's more, Hilton is in negotiations for some kind of Twitter deal with three major advertisers. Media Post News reports that the deals are worth "six figures," and will involve him plugging the products on his Twitter feed, which boasts not quite 1 million followers (999,132 at the time this article was published).

In any case, the change of direction comes at an interesting time for Hilton. In April, Hilton -- who is gay -- dabbled in activism, using his blog to famously blast the answer of then-Miss California Carrie Prejean to his question on gay marriage during the Miss USA Pageant, for which he served as a judge.

But it's difficult to know how -- or whether -- that media firestorm is related to Hilton's future plans.

Some speculate that Hilton is following the lead of Microsoft's new MSN Wonderwall service, a celebrity gossip site that has touted itself as being cleaner than PerezHilton.com -- and has thus far yielded an impressive return on advertising.

Interestingly, Wonderwall -- which employs an editorial staff of five -- recently published an AP piece on Hilton, painting him as a savvy media personality with good instincts for what's hot.

That being the case, the amount Hilton tones down his site -- if at all -- and the resultant traffic and advertising implications will be the next measure of just how business savvy he is.