Who Says Bugz and Starter Jackets Aren’t Cool?

I went snowboarding on Friday and had an epifany of sorts. It could have just been that warm, sunny days in the middle of January bring out the kooks, but most snowboarders are not cool. Now that I am focusing a bit more energy on YoBeat I want to figure out how to make it unique, but also have mass appeal. As it stands right now we are failing miserably.

It seems like you have two options in something such as the snowboard media: Appeal to the core while alienating the masses, or appeal to the masses and alienate the core. Obviously it seems the later would be more appealing in a business model (numbers sell ads!) but the core are the ones who are buying new product every year and driving the trends. And it can definitely be argued that the starter jacket set aren’t ever going to read the magazines anyway.

But thanks to the endless possibilities of the Internet some variation in media is starting to appear. The first site that comes to mind is Shayboarder. While most of the “cool kids” I know don’t really appreciate what Shay is doing (I mean she doesn’t even care about being cool!) she is doing a lot of things right. Great content for beginners, and she is covering snowboarding because she truly loves it and her passion exudes from every post. I think the general public, who only snowboard because they enjoy it (and are mostly beginners), really appreciate that about her site. And it seems like she has a following to show for it.

But with YoBeat we’ve definitely taken the opposite approach and now I am sitting here thinking, what the hell am I doing? Don’t get me wrong, traffic is good and click through rates are even better, but growth potential seems limited because we are appealing to about 2% of snowboarders (at least according to my exhaustive research  of riding on Friday.)

I am sure I am not the first, or the last, person to debate this, but now that the Internet is completely changing things, maybe it’s worth reconsidering things.  I enjoying reading YoBeat and it seems other people do to, so we’ll probably stay the course, but who knows…Just some food for thought I guess.

Our media kit is coming along (ok, not really) but when it’s done it’s going to be awesome!

Enough about that. These pictures of Jeff were taken with my new point and shoot, the Panasonic Lumix FX37. Pretty sick (the camera, not my skills.)