Online traffic to quiksilverpro.com.au, the first event of the 2010 ASP World Tour has shown significant levels of viewers, according to results from online traffic analysis Alexa. Marking a triumphant start to the new year, viewing of the Quiksilver Pro on the Gold Coast hit estimated “219,000 daily users” according to comments made by on air commentators. Whilst it was an impressive start to the year, traffic did not top that of the most watched contest last year, the Billabong Pipeline Masters, but managed to just nudge in above the second highest rating contest, the Rip Curl Search by a whisker.
Last week, in-time for the QuiksliverPro at Snapper Rocks, Quiksilver released an iPhone App enabling live viewing of the contest from your Apple branded mobile phone.
There are over 100,000 iPhone apps, out there and many of them are average or unimpressive at best, so with anticipation, I downloaded the app and had a look around. Installing the app before the contest began told me little about it. Lots of Quiksilver branding (to be expected), a Day counter, showing how far into the contest waiting period we are, a ‘Live’ toggle, indicating if the contest is on right now or not, a ‘Call’ count-down telling us when the next heats may or my not be called (very handy for us over here in the UK, being that the heats run mostly over night..), photos, videos and news buttons plugging you in to the media from the event as it arrives, Results, Windguru Forecast and ‘Media’ Section all adorn the bottom of the app homepage allowing easy access to the the peripheral data.
So, down to the meat. The contest starts and the heats are in the water, I hit the small but usable ‘Live’ button top-right of the homepage.
A new screen transitions-in, with a big play button, and the form for sending messages in to the commentators beneath it.
I hit the play button. The screen transitions into the native Quicktime fullscreen player for the iPhone, and I’m watching ASP contest surfing live from Australia, sat on my sofa in the North East of the UK. There are few glitches, no pixelation, and the audio and video quality are both about an 8 out of ten – as good as the web at-least.
A quick look backwards
I’ve followed the ASP tour for nearly twenty years, on and off. When I started, I would have to read Surfer Mag each month to see what had happened, and in those day the tour was much less developed, with events changing from year to year and structure and sponsors still figuring things out.
In the last few years, the ability to watch the event live on the web has totally changed the way the tour is covered from a spectator and media point of view. I can now watch live from wherever I am in the world, which is handy, as surfers are often strewn all over the globe. That said, the quality of the streams and the websites has been shaky, with certain contests and sponsors doing the job better than others. There were times when the stream was so bad that it was nicer to wait for the results to be posted through websites.
Quiksliver have nailed it
Quiksilver were always better at the web streams, in my experience anyway, and with their help the sport has moved on leaps-and-bounds, and this year is even being shown live on FuelTV in Australia and other countries.
Its no surprise then that the iPhone app was right on the money. I watched the first five heats of Round 1, before having to go charge my phone, and the quality of the experience was every-bit as good as the web stream I usually watch. The video size appears to be the same as the web, so all that changes really is the proximity you are to the phone. I was sat horizontal on the sofa, resting the iPhone on my chest, watching Slater rip the shit out of his heat. Superb.
Its really not fair to measure the app against a TV show or surf DVD, all we really have is the web-feed to compare with, and it totally stands up to that. Whats more this is a FREE iPhone app, no money down – nothing paid, and it doesn’t get any better than that, especially with the ASP iPhone app costing £2.99 (though this does give you access to all the ASP events, not just Quiksilver ones… but thats a different review.).
Bring on France – the next Quiksilver sponsored event – and lets hope Rip Curl and Billabong jump on the bandwagon…
Some other points
I did try and send a message to Peter Mel and Martin Potter via the form facility, but this appeared to hang, no great loss really. The live scores, accessible from the ‘Live Scores’ button on the Live page worked with a quick refresh, allowing you to see the waves scores for each surfer in the heat. The only other speed-bump was ‘Results’ page, which took till the Round was over before the results filtered in, meaning you couldn’t quickly check the scores in the heat previous. All said though, not a bad show.
Disclosure
As with all web-streamed media, the quality of stream will depend on your connection. I was sat at home using a 2MB WIFI connection with only one other person sharing the bandwidth. Im sure on a 3G connection the feed and app would work very differently, if at-all.
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Wanna buy some boardies?
Seems the race between the big boys to be first with their online stores up and running has been taken out by Quiksilver. You can now buy a full range of QS gear via their website til your wallet is empty or until your card bounces..
I just went thru the process of buying something in the store, be prepared for multiple steps (5 steps) before you give your CC info and then you have another three steps before the process is finished. Thats a long time, patience will be key… There’s nothing on the site yet that is hyping the online store so if your keen looking, be sure to hit the Products button on the menu below to get to the shop area…
The Quiksilver Home Page. A lot of flash elements, not much navigational direction. Looks pretty, but whats more important to display; Julians cool board spray, or all that content hiden out back?
First range getting the online treatment is the second summer offering, or high summer as its more affectionately known. We took a quick sniff on what’s available in the store right now, heard there is more to be added, but at the moment you can grab Diamond Dobby Boardshorts, Tees, Accessories, and some other stuff..
Word on the street is that Jetty Surf/SDS is about to drop their online store. City Beach, if you shop there, already has. And I’m sure it won’t be long until the other brands all get their acts happening and enter the online sales realm…
surfstich.com : These guys know how to run an online store. I recently bought a t-shirt from them, the overall service was great.
It’s certainly leading a new era for the surf industry, in many ways it’s creating a whole new playing field. Be interesting to see how it all unfolds..
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Results from alexa.com show the spike in traffic to billabongpro.com, plus aspworldtour.com
Online traffic to the Billabong Pro at Jeffreys Bay, South Africa looks to have set a whole new level of viewers, higher then that of any other ASP Event in 2009, according to analysis of online reach using Alexa. Using the online traffic monitoring tool, the graph above shows the worldwide users peaking over the final 2 days of competition at a new level not seen all year.
Indepth statistics from official sources for all contests are not widely available, but a search using the Alexa tool, cross-referencing the ASP, Billabong, Rip Curl, Quiksilver and Boost Mobile Pro events would suggest that the amount of traffic to billabongpro.com could be an all time high for the webcast productions of professional surfing.
Alexa analysis of the major webcast platforms over past 2 years. The red line against the right hand side of the graph represents the Billabong Pro J-Bay. The Boost Mobile Pro and Rip Curl Search are right up there too.
The large spike in traffic is an extremely positive result for Billabong and all the sponsors, the ASP, the surfers and the wider surfing community; a well earnt justification that the time, money and effort invested into the webcasts continue to reach new levels and set new benchmarks in online sports broadcasting.
The J-Bay Cocktail
The combination of the Clash Of The Icons social experiementation, the best swell we’ve seen on tour all year, a giant slaying local hero, a resurgent world champion and a new king in the making, gelled together by Billabong’s interactive media prowess, were all the ingredients required in setting a new benchmark for the webcasts. As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s no longer just a webcast, it’s an interactive experience. And it continues to get better each contest.
South African’s Come Out To Play
In the biggest result of the contest, more surprising than the early eliminations of Kelly, Mick, Adriano and Taj, is that online traffic from South Africa was greater than any other country, making up 29% off all traffic, 6% more than the might of the USA, and more than 3 times that of Australian traffic. The results below show a healthy mix of the top surfing nations logging in to watch the action take place.
Demographic Analysis of Worldwide Users
I can’t wait for Trestles…
A Billabong model, popular with most walks of life. Just keep your distance from the footy players love
Billabong has topped the list of Australia’s most familiar sports sponsors, out-performing a whole host of mainstream brands, according to the latest report from research consultancy Sweeney Sports. Despite declining slightly from 32% sponsorship awareness to 30% from the previous survey, Billabong ranked equal 1st place with Kellog’s Nutri Grain breakfast cereal.
Rip Curl took out 8th place with 20% brand awareness, coming in behind powerhouses Nike, Ford and Adidas, whilst Quiksilver placed equal 14th alongside VB (Australia’s most popular beer), Fosters and Kia.
Results 1st published on Mumbrella, report the survey involved 1000 telephone interviews carried out late blast year and early this year. The previous survey covered 2006-2007.
Will Parko become the next Ricky Ponting? Australia's Most Marketable Sports Star
Results from the Sweeney Sports survey:
1 Billabong - 30% awareness;
1 Nutri-Grain - 30% +4
3 Nike - 28% -5
4 Ford - 26% -1
4 Uncle Tobys - 26% -1
6 Speedo - 22% +8
7 Adidas - 20% -3
8 Rip Curl - 19% +1
9 Holden/GMH - 18% -1
10 Toyota - 17% +2
10 Emirates - 17% 0
12 Telstra/ Telstra/Big Pond - 16% -8
12 Kellogg - 16% +1
14 VB (Victoria Bitter) - 13% -2
14 Foster’s - 13% -6 ?14 Kia - 13% -2
14 Quiksilver- 13% 0
18 KFC - 12% +10
18 3/three.com - 12%
20 Gatorade - 7% 0
The Revolution Will Be Webcast
This accomplishment is all the more impressive considering sports media coverage in Australia is heavily dominated by Cricket, Australian Rules, Rugby League, Rugby Union and Soccor (the real football!), all of whom are broadcast live on prime time television. This should add fuel to the fire that the marketing dollars spent online producing the webcasts, have been justified.
Statistics talk. Bullshit walks.
The footy and cricket reap lucrative TV broadcast deals leveraged from official figures measuring viewing audiences. The big question in my books, when will we seen an official body tracking, monitoring and reporting online audience figures for the ASP World Tour Webcast?
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Without attempting to drown in a pool irony, I thought it only appropriate to kick of this blog, with a post about blogs. I have to admit; this is about the 4th blog I’ve started, most of which went nowhere fast. Why?
Time and content.
Finding time to blog when you’ve got a number of commitments such as work, family, and not to mention surfing as much as possible often makes it hard for me to pull my finger out and start posting. Not to mention developing a niche content plan.
I’m not a photographer. I don’t shoot video. Though I wish I did both. So the chances of creating exclusive, quality content are slim and nil. My previous efforts saw me heading down the same 10 Questions road as every other blog and website out there. Whilst that was fun, it wasn’t unique or compelling.
So I went back to the drawing board to try and carve out a niche gap in the increasingly competitive world of digital surf media. And that’s exactly where I found the gap.
Is it just me, or has the number of surfing websites and blogs seemed to have doubled since the start of 2009 compared to years past? More so, it seems traditional print media have finally pulled their fingers out and realised they need to be just as competitive online as they are in print. But we’ll come back to that in the next few posts.
I’m a regular reader of all the industry press I can get my hands on, including Boardsport Source, Australian Surf Business and Transworld Business. But being a digital media enthusiast / junkie / tosser, I’m yet to find anywhere dedicated to the online environment of surf media in the digital space.
Surfing is leading the way in global sports with live web casting, and the endless amount of content that makes the sport so rich. So hence, this blog will be dedicated to digital surf media.
10 Blogs You Should Check Out (In Alphabetical Order)
5Ones Very ‘cali action sports’ (surf / skate / snow), which is all the more noticeable if you’re not from California, but this blog seems to be getting better all the time with the quality and frequency of their content.
Billabong I have to say, I’m on here almost every day because they’re constantly hooking me in with links via Twitter. Some brands don’t get how to differentiate between their website, and a blog, but they seem to have adapted a great strategy to creating content for the blog.
Board Of Marketing You guessed it, a marketing blog checking out some of the hottest marketing campaigns in surfing. Still early days for this blog, but definitely one to keep an eye on.
Caught Inside This is a cool blog because they’ve carved themselves a niche. Surfing movie news, reviews and insider tips. Not the most comprehensive blog by any means, and it’s very California (not there’s anything wrong with that), but if you’re after some surf clips to watch, and can’t be arsed with youtube, it’s worth a look.
.tv/dion Dion seems to have THE best job in the world. Surf. Party. Blog. BIG kudos to Globe for being one of the 1st on the case with letting free surfers run wild with the blog.
The Goods Life The social media stars of the ASP world tour. I say that because CJ and Damo are totally on it with their blog, posting pretty much every day on their adventures around the globe. Pun intended.
The Mountain And The Wave For a global brand, Quiksilver’s blog feels very pro-USA (which is not a bad thing), but I’d like to see them utilise their worldwide network with producing content from some other regions. But there is sh*t loads of content here which you could spend hours / days digesting. Digg in.
Modern Collective Incase you haven’t heard, Modern Collective is the brand spanking new project from Taylor Steele protégé Kai Neville. After kicking round for a while making awsomse DVDs for the Australian surf rags, and most recently having a major hand in the Poor Specimen production Stranger Than Fiction, Modern Collective channels the current psychedelic-electro-triangle-rave scene, with big crazy airs and busting of fins at every opportunity with the likes of Jordy, Julian, Dane and the newest of nu-skool.
RVCA This is one of those ones where the brand website adopts the blog format. And with the very strong artistic focus of RVCA, it works perfect for them. Cool as f**k. Please send me some clothes.
The Rock Rip Curl have adapted the calendar format blog, which is hardly revolutionary, but works really well for The Rock project. Daily blog entries over 20 days in Hawaii. Keeps me clicking on everyday. Hours of fun here.
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