The Romp

» see theromp.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Eric Eisner and Bruce Forman met at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. They were 26 and 28 when they put their own seed money into Romp.com in 2000 and then raised $15 million from private investors on top of it. Eisner's father was Michael Eisner, who at that moment was running Disney, and it is not possible to write about this company without that sentence appearing somewhere, so it may as well be here.

The site went live in april 2000, out of Los Angeles, and it was a Flash entertainment portal in the fullest sense of that phrase. Original animated shows carried names like Booty Call, Tardz, Coach Bigot and Officer Krupt, and around them sat message boards and chat rooms. There was a steady quantity of softcore photography too. It was aimed squarely at young men and it did not pretend otherwise, and the numbers came in fast: nearly 200,000 users in the first six weeks.

By march 2001 there were 600,000 registered accounts and a subscription tier called The Romp Mafia, which signed 11,000 paying members in its first three weeks. On paper that is a working business. The staff had already gone from 35 at launch to 14 by the autumn of 2000, which tells you the paper and the bank statement were saying different things.

In may 2001 Forman cut four more people, leaving eleven, and announced that Romp.com would stop making original programming for the web and go after traditional media instead. His stated reason was that it is mission impossible to make money off the Internet with original programming. He was right, by about seven years. YouTube was four years away and the broadband to watch it on was further than that, and out here on a Turkish phone line in 2001 a Flash cartoon was not something you watched, it was something you waited for.

~ the case file ~

~ the money ~

$15 million was not an unusual number for this in 2000. It was roughly the going rate for a Los Angeles company that had decided the internet was going to need shows, and there were several of them raising it at the same time. Digital Entertainment Network burned considerably more and never launched properly. Icebox had better writers and the same ending. Pseudo.com had been streaming video out of a SoHo loft since 1994 and folded in september 2000.

What all of them had in common was a cost structure borrowed from television and a distribution medium that could not deliver television. Every one of them was paying writers and animators to make video for an audience mostly sitting behind modems. The Romp's advantage was that Flash cartoons are small, which is why it outlived several of its neighbors, and its disadvantage was that Flash cartoons are cheap to copy, which is why the audience did not need to come to the site to see them.

~ the funny part ~

The pivot to traditional media actually produced something. Romp Studios made a feature-length version of Booty Call, called Jake's Booty Call, in 2003. Eric Eisner co-wrote and co-directed it, and National Lampoon picked it up for distribution. So the web series that was supposed to prove the internet could support original programming ended up as a direct-to-video comedy under the National Lampoon label, which is the most 2003 sentence available.

Booty Call itself was 33 multiplot Flash games by Julian Max Metter, and the multiplot part is worth pausing on. These were branching interactive shorts, made in a drawing tool, distributed for free, at a moment when interactive video required either a games console or a CD-ROM. The technology was ahead of the business by a decade in exactly the way the business could not use.

~ what it became ~

The site kept running in some form until 2005, four years after it stopped being the thing it was funded to be. The Los Angeles Business Journal headline when it went was that an Eisner web venture had sunk and gone offline, and that was more or less the whole obituary anyone wrote at the time.

Everything The Romp was trying to do got done, later, by people who did not pay for it. Free hosting, no production budget, no staff of 35, an audience with enough bandwidth. Newgrounds was already running while Romp was raising money and it is still running now, on close to nothing. The lesson the 2000 cohort taught, expensively, is that the internet did not want a studio. It wanted an upload button.

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