AOL has come to Los Angeles in search of the ultimate wave. And the ultimate vert-ramp. And the ultimate motocross course.
The Internet giant is launching an action sports portal, called Lat34.com, and is on the hunt for office space on the West Side. The site is a joint venture between AOL and Fusion Entertainment, a Portland-based production company that specializes in extreme sports programming.
AOL, based in Dulles, Va., is the latest entrant to the skate park. Fox Entertainment launched FuelTV and its companion Web site FuelTV.com in L.A. in 2003 with more than 100 employees; and El Segundo-based GrindTV.com launched last year, backed by Newport Beach venture capital firm SoftBank Capital. And don’t forget ESPN’s EXPN.com, the official site for the X Games and extreme sports; social networking powerhouse MySpace also has action sports pages.
“L.A. is the unofficial home of action sports,” said Lat34.com Chief Executive Jeff Rowe, a former senior vice president at AOL.
Lat34, which took its name from the GPS coordinates of Los Angeles, launched the first week in June. Yahoo! Inc., whose Yahoo Sports division is based in Santa Monica, does not have an action-sports specific portal, though it does cover the X Games, according to a spokesman.
The company will have about 20 employees in its soon-to-be leased headquarters. And to hear Rowe describe the site, the company is trying to draw from all the current youth-market buzzwords: it aims to become the MySpace.com, YouTube.com, iTunes, instant message, mobile content and blogspot for action sports kids.
“Our goal is to create a new space, a home for interactive sports online,” Rowe said.
With AOL’s marketing muscle behind it, Lat34 already has a media partnership with the Dew Action Sports Tour, the professional competitive tour owned by NBC Universal Inc. and Live Nation, sponsored by Mountain Dew. The site signed up Jeep as its first sponsor. It will combine traditional media coverage of sports events, as well as social networking and viral video content.
Emerging sector
The action sports world is still fragmented. Though the surf, skate and snowboard culture has gained more mainstream popularity over the past 10 years, the juggernaut of standard pro sports has proved a tough nut to crack.
EXPN.com launched in 1997, built around the summer and winter X Games, but has struggled to gain traction the rest of the year. The company is currently “at a crossroads” with the action sports site, according to X Games General Manager Chris Stiepock. It is trying to figure out the best way to span the action sports realm.
“It’s hard to be all things to all people,” said Andy Tompkins, director of action sports retailer trade shows produced by VNU Expositions Inc.
Other companies are sticking to a fragmented approach. TransWorld Media, owned by Time Warner Inc., publishes TransWorld Surfing, Snowboarding, Skating and motocross magazines and has separate affinity Web sites for each one. So does Primedia Inc., publisher of Surfer, Snowboarder, Skateboarder, Climbing, Slam, Powder and Bike magazines. Action sports retailers also now boast their own sites Australian surf retailer Billabong International Ltd. offers a Web community surrounding its Billabong Pro Surf events. Nike Corp. recently launched an action sports site, called NK6.0, which features only Nike’s extreme sports athletes. It also encourages users to send in their video clips.
“Most sites have a core competency: they can cover skateboarding, or they can cover surf but they can’t do both,” Tompkins said.
At least that’s been the popular wisdom in the industry.
Maintaining credibility and staying “true” to the sport is a big concern for retailers in this niche, and broad sites like Lat34.com, EXPN.com and GrindTV.com may not attract the core brands that drive these sports.
“We’ve found that most skateboarders stick to skateboarding sites,” said Eladio Correa, brand marketing manager for Etnies, a skate-driven footwear and apparel brand owned by Lake Forest-based Sole Technologies Inc.
Extreme community?
There are those who disagree with that popular wisdom. PureVideo Networks Inc. launched GrindTV.com last year as a video community for action sports of all kinds. It encourages submissions, and the site has a rich selection of user-generated clips of kids “hitting sick jumps.” Videos are divided into categories: skate, surf, snow, dirt, water, air and stunts. It now streams 80 million videos per month to 5 million users, boasting advertisers such as Nissan Xterra and Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Portable.
“When EXPN.com started, there was probably an average of 10 skate parks per state,” Stiepock said. “Now there’s 100 skate parks per state, and at every skate park there’s a group of kids with digital cameras.”
GrindTV sends crews to the U.S. Snowboarding Championships to cover Olympic medalist Shaun White, or to the Van’s Triple Crown of Surfing in Hawaii, producing profiles of the female athletes in the competition. Those videos will be featured alongside video clips from users of their own “epic tubes” in Hawaii. Lat34 wants to do the same thing. So does EXPN.com.
“People say you need to be sports-specific in order to be credible,” said Erik Hawkins, chief executive of PureVideo Networks. But he sees action sports as an all-encompassing lifestyle: die-hard snowboarders are still interested in people who surf or skate. “It’s why ESPN doesn’t just cover football,” he said.
