Boarding into the Age of New Media
HE
AT
HE
R
AL
FO
RD
Action sport magazine publisher SBC Media has slowly expanded their brand to the Internet - with great success B y H e at h e r A l f o r d
Y
ou’d think a magazine with a lock on the Internet generation would jump at the chance to spread its content online. Yet, SBC Media magazines were relatively late in the game to go online with full force. But since they have, they’ve experienced nothing but success. Their magazines, covering action sports such as snowboarding, surfing and kiteboarding, have become dominant in their respective niche markets. Now, that success has transferred effortlessly to the web. How did they do it? SBC does not merely produce magazines, it creates various media content and distributes it across different platforms. They’re more than magazines, they’re a brand. Though SBC created a website for its flagship magazine, Snowboard Canada, in 2003, essentially it was just to have web presence. It wasn’t until 2006 that the company gave a real push to
2 8 | m a g w o r ldonline.com
its websites. “We’ve always had sustained growth. We never try to grow too fast,” says Scott Birke, editor of Snowboard Canada. 2006 seems late in the Internet world but according to Steve Jarrett, SBC Media founder and group publisher, the delay in going online was not entirely by choice. It was partly due to the lack of interest from advertisers in online advertising. Companies are “really good with print creative,” says Jarrett, “but most of the [online] ads we get from the industry aren’t really all that exciting.” No website can offer an advertising spot as large as one or two pages of a magazine which means companies can’t be as artistic or aesthetic. “Ultimately, advertising is what greases the wheels for magazines, video and online and those wheels are still pretty dry,” says Jarrett. “They could use a lot more grease for the online part of things.” Online advertising proved to be more problematic because computers can’t portray action
sports photography the way the pages of a magazine can. “The magazines and the sports are very photo focused and you can’t showcase photography online yet and I don’t know if we ever will,” says Jarrett. “In the magazine, the kids read the ads just as much as they do the editorial content and sometimes you can’t tell the difference between the two.” This photography dilemma has worked out to SBC’s advantage. Birke says, “still photography is always going to look better on the pages of a magazine as opposed to a computer screen, so in that way we know that people are always going to want a physical copy.” Since 2006, online traffic to snowboardcanada.com has grown prompting a total overhaul in December 2009. “We wanted to make sure we could do it right and we wanted to make sure we had the right people in place so we could get a product out there