Pay To Play At Kobe Bryant’s New Website

January 5, 2009

Want the latest information on Lakers shooting guard Kobe Bryant? It’ll cost ya.

The recently relaunched KB24.com sports not just a clean charcoal and chrome design courtesy of Ground (CTRL) and nineindustries, but some social networking and fan interaction features (video, audio, photos, chats, personal profile pages, etc.) and a $50 price tag to access them all.

Oh don’t worry, you also get a T-shirt with that purchase. See? It’s not all bad.

If you’re looking to go the free route, Kobe’s new site still offers some information. The “News” portion of the site functions a bit like a blog, offering information on Kobe’s media appearances, games, and new kicks available in the KB24.com store. You can also check out the Lakers home and away schedule and purchase tickets through TicketMaster.com. The “Media” portion contains over 85 videos of Kobe in various behind-the-scenes footage, and “Camps” provides information on Kobe Basketball Academy at Loyola Marymount University in July 2009.

At a time when more NBA players are taking command of their web presence not just through sites like Twitter, but through the NBA as well, $50 seems a steep price to pay for features which some sites offer for free. I’m hoping the T-shirt makes up most of that price, but even if it doesn’t, I’m curious as to how many diehard KB fans are going to shell out a Grant for that access.

Category: Celeb 2.0, Launches, Redesigns, web 2.0 | Tags: kb24.com, kobe bryant

ljones

I'm interested in knowing how this will do. I haven't seen any stats on how the ESPN360 model faired. Although ESPN went after the ISP instead of the user. But no ISP I used paid the fee to allow access. And I'm not missing the content anyway.

I'm all for these web presences, but I had when these leagues lock down the content. ESPN shows only interviews and stats of NFL games, but no actual footage. I refuse to go to the NFLs site to watch the video due to the way they are handling their content online. Just like the NFL network was created to be the destination point for everything NFL, it just doesn't compare to what ESPN does, even when they hire some of ESPN's people. And i see ESPN just updated their site too.