Check out the trailer for the powerful film Alekesam that explores the life of musician Hugh Masekela and his relationship to his son, action sports announcer, Sal Masekela. As director Jason Bergh says:
It began as a simple, four minute promo for my dear friend Sal Masekela’s new album, and emerged as the greatest project of my career, and the most important story I have ever told. The world has known Sal Masekela as the face of action sports for more than fifteen years. But they have not known the man behind the name, Selema Mabena Masekela, whose last name represents not only worldwide musical success and fame, but personal and political struggle.
The Q1 2012 numbers from theAssociation of Magazine Media (formerly the Magazine Publishers of America) seem to suggest that there is no bottom to the magazine advertising slide.
While we’re getting tired of saying this we’ll say it one more time: As Transworld Media is the only action sports company whose print advertising is tracked by the MPA we’ll run their numbers and use them as the harbinger for the rest of the action sports print business.
Overall magazine advertising was down 8.2 percent for the quarter so Skateboarding, Surf, and Wakeboarding were ahead of the market. The other titles were decidedly not.
Advertising in Transworld’s parent company Bonnier Corp magazines (that are tracked by the MPA) were down 9.5 percent (excluding Transworld titles) while Transworld titles were down 11.5 percent over all in Q1 vs. 2011.
Brands that are still buying ads in print must be making publishers so happy, but from the looks of this they are becoming less enthusiastic. No worries though. There’s always the Internet where advertising was up 22 percent in 2011.
To look back on past Boardistan coverage of action print advertising numbers click here.
Seeing as print media is all the rage lately, Andy Summons, Tom Batrouney, and Andrew Diprose decided they’d like to jump on board with a new surf print publication. The result–a 224 page quarterly “book” called Paper Sea, according to a story in The Australian.
Distancing themselves from the stereotypical surf story about rad dudes with blond hair and shark tooth necklaces, Paper Sea Quarterly caters to the wider surfing and artistic community, unearthing an edgy world of street art, design, photography, hip hop and of course, surfing. “We’re not just interested in the world’s top 44 surfers, we’ve got guys who work in retail, in cafes, but they surf incredibly and they’re interesting people with incredible stories,” Paper Sea photo editor Tom Batrouney said. . . “There is nothing on the market that’s similar to it. There are surf magazines aimed at surfers that are only interested in surfing, which makes up a very small percentage of surfers,” he said. . . Batrouney says every time someone calls their 224-paged tribute to surfing, art and style a magazine he dies a little inside. . . “It kills me every time I hear that word, it in no way resembles a magazine, it’s 2.5cm thick.”
Sounds a little like Mike Ballard’s The Skatebook(RIP) only for surfers. Hopefully this works out a little better than that.
We don’t watch it anymore, but it appears that Fox may be hoping to push Fuel TV into the mainstream by ditching action-only content and running straight into main stream sports coverage, according to a story on Deadline.com
No final decision has been made, but the plan would involve converting the company’s action sports network Fuel (36 million subs) into a new national offering, which would compete against fellow cablers Disney/ABC’s ESPN, Comcast’s new NBC Sports Network and the CBS Sports Network. Like those entities, News Corp is attracted to the juicy affiliate fees a national sports network can command.
Might as well go to where the audience is. It’s certainly not in action sports. But Fuel was a nice try, certainly.
Eddie Aikau’s surviving siblings Myra, Solomon and Clyde Aikau have filed suit in Hawaii’s First Circuit Court to stop Glendale, California based Your Half Media Group from “claiming the right to make” a bio-pic on their brother, according to a story on Courthouse New Service.
The Aikaus claim Your Half is falsely claiming publicity rights to Eddie Aikau’s life story, and deterring other film companies from making such a movie. . . The Aikaus, who say they already held all trade and service marks to the use of Eddie’s name, formed Aikau Family LLC in 2010 to reserve publicity rights to his name. . . According to the complaint, in 2004 and without advice of counsel, the plaintiffs executed an agreement giving Your Half Pictures an 18-month option “to use plaintiffs Myra, Solomon and Clyde Aikau’s ‘names, likeness, personal history, etc. as needed, in conjunction with a feature film based upon a book by entitled, ‘Eddie Would Go,’ by Stuart Holmes Coleman.”
But the Aikaus claim Your Half Media failed to make “a significant payment to the Eddie Aikau Foundation” and made no progress on film production. Now the Aikaus are seeing “seek declaratory and injunctive relief and treble damages for tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, unfair and deceptive trade, unfair competition and infringement of publicity rights.” We hope this gets sorted out soon, because Eddie Would Go is a movie we’d like to see.
With more than 300 hours of film shot during the 2010 tour, No Room For Rockstars documents the true stories of modern era rock and roll from every possible angle. From the kids in the van playing parking lots to gain notice, to the veteran stage manager whose life was saved by the tour, to the musician who crosses over to mainstream success while on the road, No Room For Rockstars is cinema verite story-telling at its finest.
Jeff Tremaine and Dickhouse productions is at it again, this time with Tyler the Creator and Odd Future. Their new show is on Adult Swim and it’s called Loiter Squad. Yes, it’s so funny you’ll spit soup through your nose.
And another from the “We’re way behind” files comes this addition to the shit people say collection, Shit Photographers Say. Yes, Crailtap put it six days ago, but we still like this one because it features Thrasher Magazine’slikable workhorse editor/photographer Michael Burnett.
We’re kind of bummed that it took us this long to notice, but on March 6, 2012 Bob Kronbauer (the creator of Pacific Skateboarding, Clubmumble.com, VancouverIsAwesome.com et al) decided to “lay the Club Mumble website to rest.” Here’s what he said:
Like any project, if you let something sit for long enough without stoking the fire and tending to it and shaping it (or launching new Honoris Professio projects, etc), it gets old. And it gets obsolete as new technologies come in and make it easier and easier to publish. I’ve been publishing online since 1997 when I started the first online skateboarding magazine (Pacific Skateboarding, remember that?) and if I know one thing for certain about myself it is that I have to dedicate myself completely to something or else I simply can’t be involved in it; I have an all or nothing kind of personality.
Kronbauer tried to get some of the many notable contributors to take of the site and maybe share a slice of the advertising with him, but no one wanted to do it so as he says he’s “closing the book on this chapter of Club Mumble. No longer an active blog, this site will now act as a time capsule for all of the super interesting projects that the members of our Club have shared here over the past few years.”
We’ll miss the site and most of all we’ll missing linking to the always engaging content.
It’s been two months since the official launch of Youtube’s new “channel strategy.” As it hasn’t changed our viewing habits, nor improved our Youtube experience in any way we were curious to see how the channels were doing. Using the numbers reported on the channels main pages we lined them all up.
Just for fun, we threw Transworld.TV in the mix just to see how a site that didn’t get $1 million dollars of start up capital was faring against the Google funded players. We also factored in the potential total revenue (shared between Youtube and the channel) generated by the channels views based on the oft quoted “quality content” CPM of $20.
Here’s how they stack up:
Subs Views Revenue
Redbull Media House 386,626 259,389,937 $5,187,798
Alli Sports 28,240 10,134,195 $202,683
Transworld TV 10,526 5,470,641 $109,412
Ride Channel 32,329 4,164,433 $83,288
Network A 28,320 1,951,528 $39,030
*Note: this is not a scientific comparison and should be used for
entertainment purposes only for all kinds of reasons including the
fact that some channels have been up much longer than others.
There is money in this game, but it seems that few of the channels (aside from Redbull) have created anything that has “gone viral.” And when you compare these channels to something like the Philip Defranco Show which has 2 million subscribers and 825 million views so far it suggests that sitting someone in front of a camera in a studio with some clever writing is a much more efficient use of funding than sending a production team around the world chasing board riders. But don’t let that stop you, you action content producers you.
