AOL Fires 105 From 2 Game Sites

One day after announcing a broadened “commitment to content creation,” leading Internet service provider America Online on Tuesday fired 105 employees from its proprietary Entertainment Asylum and WorldPlay entertainment/game sites.

Culver City-based Entertainment Asylum lost 40 people--half its staff--including programming president Scott Zakarin, who co-founded the site with the late entertainment executive Brandon Tartikoff.

WorldPlay cut 40 people working in Oakhurst on a now-scuttled 3-D game (CyberPark), along with 25 employees in its Burlingame office.

The cutbacks point up the ongoing struggle to develop compelling content for the Web. Zakarin previously produced “The Spot,” a highly touted but short-lived online soap opera.

Entertainment Asylum launched just four months ago into an already-crowded field of entertainment-themed sites, including E! Online and Mr. Showbiz. The site offers information on films, music and television shows. It also stages interviews and chat sessions with stars, with actor Dustin Hoffman scheduled to be interviewed on Friday.

Entertainment Asylum is part of Dulles, Va.-based AOL’s strategy to break free from being only in the competitive, low-margin business of providing Internet access.

Earlier AOL content attempts have had mixed results: the Motley Fool financial site is a big hit, while others such as iVillage, have had moderate success. (As part of a new strategy announced last fall, AOL began offering most of its content on the Web.)

AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley said the cuts--which were not officially announced--were part of the company restructuring announced on Monday. She emphasized they did not indicate a failure on the part of the sites.

According to Bentley, Entertainment Asylum had reached its goal of 1 million page views per day ahead of its 100-day schedule. AOL admitted when the site launched, however, that it would be at least two years before it was profitable.

“There’s a commitment on behalf of AOL to content,” she said. “The company is organizing itself to leverage its resources, rather than create redundancies.”

According to a source close to the situation, Entertainment Asylum employees were informed of the firings at a hastily called meeting on Tuesday. The cuts were attributed to AOL’s reorganization plans.

Laid-off employees were asked to clear out their desks immediately, said the source, who asked not to be named. Workers from the secretarial to management levels were let go, the source said.

Bentley said WorldPlay would be folded into a preexisting AOL site, AOL Games.

AOL’s stock hit an all-time high on Monday after the company announced its restructuring--including the layoff of 500 people from its just-acquired CompuServe subsidiary--and a price hike from $19.95 to $21.95 for monthly online access.