Wall Street

We have to give credit to Scott Tilton, founder of Loop’d Network. He continues to land great press release fodder for his “online community for action sports.” This time he’s lined up to be the “official online community” for X Games 15, according to a story in the San Diego Business Journal.

As part of the agreement, ESPN.com Action Sports will provide year-round news for Loop’d Network across all of its action sports hubs. ESPN will also provide RSS feeds from ESPN’s columnists and bloggers in skateboarding, snowboarding, free skiing and surfing.

Wait, can’t anyone run and ESPN RSS feed is they want? Isn’t that what RSS feeds are? Guess this is just one more thing about Loop’d Network that we’ll never understand.

[Link: San Diego Business Journal]

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It’s a good thing we never seem to tire of beating the dead pony named print, because the news from the world of magazine advertising (not surprisingly) just keeps getting worse in Q2 2009, according to a story on Media Buyer Planner.

All categories tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau were down by double digits, with automotive, financial, insurance and real estate being hit the hardest, writes Media Life. Automotive fell 47.8%, while financial was down 48.8%. Toiletries and cosmetics performed the best, down 14.1%. . . Total rate-card reported spending for the second quarter was down 22%, while total spending for the first half was down 21.1%.

But how are things going in the land of action sports magazines? Well, as we say nearly every quarter, the only mags from our world that get tracked by the Magazine Publishers of America are those produced by Bonnier Corporation’s Transworld Media. And while it could be argued that it’s not fair to only pick on them, we don’t have the time (nor the magazines) to count up the ad pages in all the action magazines. So here’s how it looked for Transworld Media vs. Q2 2008 based on total ad revenue and advertising pages.

                         $2009      $2008        %change  Pages 09   Pages 08  %change
Transworld Snowboarding  1,069,312   1,897,419   -43.6     52.84      98.33    -46.3
Transworld Skateboarding 7,358,215   9,149,705   -19.6    334.67     433.20    -22.7
Transworld Surf          2,536,506   3,710,912   -31.6    230.67     353.00    -34.7
TransWorld Motocross     3,111,709   4,004,212   -22.3    248.71     336.01    -26.0
RIDE BMX                 1,256,788   1,231,590     2.0    127.33     131.02     -2.8
Quad Off Rad Mag         1,174,915   1,739,876   -32.5    123.19     189.96    -35.1

That’s a drop of 424 pages of advertising in three months and while we don’t really think the revenue amounts are accurate (they’re based on full rate card pricing), it does represent a ($5,226,269) pretty large percentage drop.

Good thing Bonnier’s foodie magazine Saveur is continuing to break records.

[Link: Magazine Publishers of America Photo via Italy from the Inside]

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