MODEL CITIZEN IN WEB WORLD; TOP INTERNET PINUP CINDY MARGOLIS TAKES ONLINE PATH TO FAME, FORTUNE.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

For the past two years, computer users have downloaded more pictures of Cindy Margolis from the Internet than of any other human on this green Earth.

Of course, that and a dollar will buy the 29-year-old Valley native a halfway decent cup of coffee. Maybe.

Such is the value of fame on the Internet, where information, and pinups, want to be free.

Or is it?

Margolis, who still lives in the Valley, is one of the first Internet stars - and she's grateful for what it has done for her.

``It's just a great vehicle for becoming known,'' Margolis said. ``I can't thank the Internet enough. If I was going to be queen or No. 1 in something, this is perfect.''

She has been on greeting cards, pinup posters, even been one of the hostesses on ``The Price Is Right,'' nibbling on the edges of prominence. But nothing has pushed Margolis into prominence like the Internet, where fans found her early and often.

Yahoo! Internet Life magazine crowned her the queen of the Internet, saying fans have pulled down more copies of her pictures than of anyone else during the past two years from places such as America Online, her own personal site and the hundreds of fan sites that have sprung up.

And, unlike some who have won a rather dubious sort of Internet fame, not a single one of the Margolis shots was nude. Go figure.

Now, Margolis is trying to jump from new media to old ones such as films, television and magazines - and make a lot of money doing it.

The babe report

On Sunday, she will host an hourlong special on the E! cable TV channel about women - well, babes - of the Internet. It will focus on Margolis and such other budding Net queens as Asia Carrera, Danni Ashe, Jennie Ringley and Anna Voog.

``She is one of the standout stars of the new media,'' said Rob Bernstein, a senior editor for Yahoo! Internet Life. ``If you go online, you'll find hundreds and hundreds of sites devoted to her.''

All summer long, Margolis will be appearing as a celebrity video jock on VH1, pushing herself and her site as much as the latest music from Madonna and Babyface.

She's beginning to pop up in magazines, most notably People, which named her one of the world's 50 most beautiful people.

She's getting movie roles, too, a couple so far this year plus last year's ``Austin Powers,'' where she played one of the identical ``fembots,'' who could ``kill a man just by looking at him.''

Margolis proved even more of a man-killer in real life: When the movie company gave away a chance to attend the premiere as Margolis' date, there were 500,000 entries.

All this is going on just as Margolis launches a beefed-up version of her Web site. Its premium memberships and product sales are her best chance to see if the medium that made her famous can also make her rich.

Melodie Calvert, who produced the E! channel's special, said Margolis has done well on the Net because few established stars in other media knew how to take advantage of its characteristics.

``A lot of the Hollywood celebs are a little bit ignorant of the Internet and didn't focus on the fans as much,'' Calvert said. ``Cindy is starting to figure out how to make it work.''

Online pioneer

Yahoo! Internet Life's Bernstein said the Internet generates fame in an odd way.

``It's the ultimate office water cooler,'' Bernstein said. ``What you find on the Net is all these bizarre grass-roots groups where something just takes off. Cindy Margolis is like that. There are a lot of models now jumping on the Net with their own sites, but she was one of the first.''

Jonas Heller, a friend of Margolis' fiance who heads the online event production arm of iXL Inc. in Westwood, is helping Margolis translate fame to cash. He said she is popular on the Net because she is a product of the Net, one of its own.

``That's the thing that really fuels Cindy's success,'' Heller said. ``She was one of the first (starlets) to have a home page. She did the chat rooms. She worked it. She's definitely one of them. I don't know anyone else like her on the Net.''

Margolis is a pleasant, vivacious woman of medium height, friendly and outgoing, with a ready and warm laugh. And while she enthuses about the fan base she's built out of the electrons of the virtual world, she's also modest about how it happened. It's all a matter of good timing, she said.

``I think I just got in at the beginning, when things were getting started,'' Margolis said.

Margolis grew up in Encino, attending Birmingham and Taft high schools before finishing at a now-defunct private school, she said.

She got her first big break when her business-class project at California State University, Northridge, turned into a greeting-card line featuring her modeling shots. She left school behind after two years and set up the card company in the family basement.

The cards led to pinup posters, then a call from America Online, which wanted to post one of her shots on the service so its members could pull down a copy of their own.

``I gave them a picture, and then AOL called the next day to say it had been downloaded 72,000 times in the first 24 hours,'' Margolis said. That opened her eyes.

``I learned all I could about the Internet,'' Margolis said. ``I didn't even know who AOL was when I started. It brought me into the '90s.''

Show her the money

Initially, she saw the Internet as a way to promote her other ventures, not a way to become famous or make money directly.

Then Bernstein's magazine called to tell her she was Queen of the Net, with her pictures the most popular download of anyone's in 1996. According to Ron Bel Bruno, another Yahoo! senior editor who compiled the figures, the competition wasn't even close.

``She had more than 700,000 downloads,'' Bel Bruno said. ``Brad Pitt, the No. 1 man, had less than half that. She placed far ahead of Teri Hatcher, Sandra Bullock, a lot of others. It was really shocking, because she's not well-known outside the Net.''

That led Margolis to create her own modest Internet site at www.cindymargolis.com. Though her fame was growing as fast as her medium, she still hadn't figured out to make it work financially.

When she was the top download again for 1997, Margolis joined with iXL, Heller's company, to beef up her site. This time, she said, she thinks she's got it right.

``After I won again this year, I figured I had to step it up and have this be a big business,'' Margolis said.

The site will sell merchandise such as posters, computer accessories, calendars and the like, and offer ``virtual signings,'' where fans can buy personalized autographed gear online.

Her revamped Web site will give subscribers access to a ``weekly live online event,'' featuring Margolis in a chat room, possibly with live video and audio, Heller said. A quarterly session open to all comers is being considered.

Close to 1 million people registered on Margolis' old site, and Heller said he hopes to persuade up to 30,000 of those to pay for memberships to join her new one.

`Intimate' connection

Margolis said she wants to use the Internet's technologies to create an ``intimate'' connection with fans. That means electronically answering questions and requests from members and sending personalized autographed pictures.

One option she's not currently pondering, however, is nude shots. The line will still stop where her bikini does.

``One of the ways she could make a lot of money is if she posed nude,'' Heller said. ``But in no way is that in the near future of her plan.''

Which isn't to say she would never strip some day, say, for a shot in a big movie with a love scene involving a certain hunky young actor.

``With Brad Pitt? I'm there,'' she said with a laugh.

Despite Margolis' fan base, she'll still have to fight for attention against the hundreds of millions of other World Wide Web pages on the Internet. So Heller plans to make deals with so-called ``content aggregators,'' the big sites that depend on big draws like Margolis to sell advertising.

Another advantage is iXL's position in the industry. Heller's group produces the chat rooms and live concerts carried on many of the biggest Internet sites, such as the Globe, Talk City and AOL's Entertainment Asylum. Heller will book her on those shows and reap the cross-promotional benefits.

``I'm making it up as we go along, but I'm making an educated guess as we go along,'' Heller said. ``I think we have the right talent, the right technology to make it work.''

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Downloading Fame

Cindy Margolis keeps it clean as Web pinup queen

(2) Cindy Margolis is happy to be downloaded off her Web site, but she draws the line at nudity - she won't do it (online, at least).

(3) Margolis, a 29-year-old Valley resident, probably isn't one of the ``fembots'' shown with Mike Myers in this ``Austin Powers'' still, but she did play one of the numerous deadly female automatons in the spy-film spoof.

Gus Ruelas/Daily News