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No Pants, Some Profits

Howard Wong formerly worked for Rockman Entertainment, www.rockmanentertainment.com as an I.T. , webmaster and camera guy.

from forbes.com: Howard Wong made $200 by taking his pants off on national TV.

The 33-year-old New Yorker made his money in May when he appeared on the Fuse cable network’s Pants Off, Dance Off. Score one for the truth in advertising crowd: As the name suggests, the show features viewers who dance and disrobe in front of music videos.

“It was a rush. I would definitely do it again,” said Wong, a software engineer for Web startup BeautyBooker.com. “I paid off my parking tickets.”

The show is also paying some bills for Cablevision’s (nyse: CVC – news – people ) Rainbow Media unit, which runs Fuse and other cable channels such as AMC, IFC and WE. Fuse, which has positioned itself as a scrappier competitor to Viacom’s (nyse: VIA – news – people ) MTV, now has a modest success on its hands. The show attracted 14.9 million viewers between May and July–paltry compared with broadcast TV hits, but not too shabby for a network that reaches only 40 million viewers.

But Pants Off really shines on the Web. Fuse said that it recorded 8.9 million page views for the show’s home page in a two-month period this summer, and that viewers downloaded 3.4 million episodes of the show for free.

“This show on the Web is actually more profitable to us than linear television right now,” said Alex Campbell, the network’s vice president of development. Fuse runs ads on its home page and the show’s Web site.

This makes sense, since Pants Off’s vibe appears custom-tailored for a YouTube/MySpace audience. Contestants dance for two to three minutes in front of a green screen featuring a music video. Every 20 to 30 seconds, producers give a cue to take off a piece of clothing. The clothing runs the gamut from a trench coat to a suit and tie to, in one case, a bear suit. Although contestants will eventually drop all their clothes, a digital fig leaf keeps the show in the PG-13 realm.

Campbell said the network wasn’t looking to recreate a strip club on television. Judging from some of the contestants, the network takes a much more democratic stance.

” Pants Off is a simple show,” Campbell said. “People go on and they play.”

The show also straddles the realm between so-called “user generated content”–videoclips that Web users make themselves, then post on Web sites like YouTube and Google Video–and professional videos made by traditional media conglomerates. But while YouTube has yet to make a dime, Pants Off is helping Cablevision expand its reach into the lucrative youth market.

In the last quarterly earnings statement, the company said second-quarter revenue at Cablevision’s lesser-distributed networks, including Fuse, hit $80 million, a 5% increase over the previous year.

For the last three years, Fuse has targeted MTV’s demographic with programming that emphasizes music. MTV itself has largely moved on from music videos in favor of reality shows like Laguna Beach. Pants Off is Fuse’s first foray into reality programming.

For next season, Fuse executives plan to ramp up competition, pitting more contestants against each other and featuring special themed shows, “like ‘Pantsers’ of the Big Ten,” Campbell said.

Fuse hopes that strategy will result in more buzz for the show. That has been the case for Wong, who now has a Web site detailing his involvement in the show and has contacted Adidas (otcbb: ADDDY – news – people ) about getting product sponsorship. But the German shoe giant has yet to write him a check.

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