Star power in cyberspace

Hollywood and the Internet are a lot alike. And plenty of celebrities are willing to trade their endorsements for a piece of the box office. Tom Arnold doesn't use the internet that much.He primarily plays solitaire on his computer and only goes online to answer e-mail. Yet that did not sway the actor from joining the board of directors and acting as spokesman for Broadband Infrastructure Group, a St. Louis Internet company. Eventually he plans to launch an Internet talk show with the company's help. Before joining Broadband, Arnold was approached by other Internet companies promising stakes in their ventures in exchange for an endorsement. "You get into these meetings and people have some very big numbers for you," Arnold says. "For a minute I believed them. "But the Internet is just like Hollywood. Every movie is going to be a hit movie and everyone is going to make half-a-billion dollars and it doesn't always work that way. That's how the Internet goes." To be certain, the Internet has produced a bumper crop of box-office flops of late, particularly on the entertainment front. For dot-com start-ups with little cash on hand, granting rich option packages to celebrities such as supermodel Cindy Crawford is a sure-fire method of securing instant branding and a measure of credibility for their sites. For the celebrities, it's a chance to gamble on the Internet bonanza like any other investor, and an opportunity to get involved in ventures in which they may share an interest beyond their mainstream careers. While some celebrities simply represent online companies, a few, like Shaquille O'Neal, Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, have become Internet moguls in their own right. Stewart runs Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, which went public last year and includes her MarthaStewart.com site in addition to her Martha Stewart Living newspaper, magazine and television offerings.