The CelebrityCafe.com celebrates 15th birthday

Websites can come and go, but Oceanside-based TheCelebrity Cafe.com is celebrating its 15th birthday, making it a virtual senior citizen in the online world.

"We have people who have been reading us since they were preteens," said Dominick Miserandino, who started the site in 1995 when he was a student at Stony Brook University. "We were never run like a dot-com, where things were done haphazardly."

TheCelebrityCafe.com is a quiet site in a noisy arena. It tells of the comings and goings in the celebrity universe, not with the electric shock offered by some sites, but rather with a gentle glove. "We're providing entertainment news," Miserandino said. "But without the slander and trash."

There is the usual fare - the trials and tribulations of Kim Kardashian and NFL player ReggieBush; the breakup of Christina Aguilera and Jordan Bratman.

But no one is slammed. "There's no need to blast people," Miserandino said.

He used the site to post stories he had done for the campus newspaper, The Statesman. Then he did a few celeb interviews and found a following. His site, he said, now has 4.5 million visitors a month, making it one of the top 50 celebrity sites in the country in terms of hits. He has six full-time employees, about 70 contributors and maintains an office in Oceanside rather than pricey Manhattan.

TheCelebrityCafe.com is profitable and even has potential suitors, Miserandino said.

Sree Sreenivasan, a professor of digital media at Columbia University, said, "Fifteen years is, indeed, a long time for a small independent site to survive. The dynamics and economics of Web publication have changed enormously over the last 15 years, and it isn't easy to sustain a site over that time period. Among the problems: Either the audience or the founder loses interest."

Miserandino plans no changes. "It's worked for 15 years," he said. "Why screw it up?"