SensoryMetrics

X17online.com is one of the leading paparazzi celebrity stalker sites now making itself a spot on inter-web. Surprisingly, although there seem to be a gazillion of these celebrity photo sites, X17online is holding a solid 4K Alexa ranking which is pretty impressive. For instance, although SM has dipped as low as the 70K mark on Alexa, we’re currently holding a frigid 347K Alexa ranking which is, just a little better than X17′s agency site. but we’re a massive ways off from the popularity had by X17online and its sister site X17video.

So what’s the overall X17 eXperience like? Is it worth a regular visit? Well, for the star struck obsessed, no doubt, you shouldn’t live a moment without seeing the latest gossip and candid shot of Britney Spears walking down the street (uh yet again but in a different outfit!) Unfortunately, the presentation of the site, is the same old mix of bad advertising banners. I mean, would you click on these ads that read “You are the 999,999th visitor congratulations you WON“?

I guess the point is, no one is looking at the ads, they’re looking at the celebrity photos and video clips. The layout is stark to say the least and there’s no apologies about it. Perhaps the point is to make the celebrities look real and as drab as possible; who would expect any less?

My one big beef with this site is that it tries to make it seem as though the photos that have been taken by X17 are not to be copied and certainly not to be distributed. Uh, WTF? Haven’t they heard of viral advertising? They’ve even gone so far as to make the right click disabled on the site. Of course, just about anyone knows, you can simply take a screen-shot to get around this limitation they’ve built in.

However, who would want a snapshot of Katherine Heigl eating her lunch in public? I’m sure there are plenty of photos of her that are far better which you could use for your desktop background if you were so inclined. To top things off the banner ads are so intrusive on this site that they actually freeze up your browser when you visit this site. It’s the ‘pièce de résistance‘ that caps the overall eXperience to be as sleazy and trashy as can be. When you visit, you should feel just a little dirty and a somehow ripped off.

Tags: x17online, celebrity-blogs

Plurk This Post Buzz This Post Facebook