David Perel’s celebrity news and gossip website, RadarOnline.com, was so overrun with Internet traffic Friday morning that it temporarily crashed.
“It was the longest 20 minutes of my life. The tech people were telling me not to pull my own Mel Gibson,” joked Perel, the site’s executive vice president. He was, of course, referring to Gibson’s angry language in a series of audio tapes released by Radar, in which the actor loudly berates his former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva and spews racial slurs.
Fueled by Radar, the Gibson story has rocketed around the world. The actor’s longtime agency, William Morris Endeavor, dropped him, and Hollywood conventional wisdom has coalesced around the idea that his career is dead. (The Times has not independently verified that it is Gibson’s voice on the recordings, but his representatives have not denied it.)
But while Gibson’s future may appear dim, things are looking up for RadarOnline. The site, like many other pop culture chroniclers, tilts heavily toward paparazzi photos and coverage of figures from reality television. But of late, Radar has been breaking bigger stories — Perel cites the January report about Tiger Woods entering a rehabilitation facility as one of the website’s watershed moments.
Still, no story has raised the site’s profile like the Gibson saga, which effectively cemented Radar’s credibility in the world of celebrity gossip. Competitors such as TMZ, Perez Hilton and US Weekly have struggled to keep up as readers flock to RadarOnline. In June, Radar had 60 million page views and midway through July, the website is “basically at that figure already,” according to Perel.
Full story: Mel Gibson tapes fuel online gossip coverage wars – latimes.com