Mark Zuckerberg wonders if the fin is facing the right direction because an executive at the World Surf League told him that the other way is cooler.

WSL + Facebook: “👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼!”

By Chas Smith

6 years ago

Surf fans react!

I was forwarded a very fine story today titled Update: Streaming from J-Bay and while it would have looked much better if it was titled Update: Streaming from J-Bay! I still enjoyed it very much. Which parts? Funny you should ask. I enjoyed:

While many fans worldwide are experiencing our high-quality coverage of the Corona Open J-Bay on Facebook, there are some that aren’t at the moment.

We would like to apologize again for any inconvenience. The technical challenges are being worked on.

We remain committed and excited about sharing the stoke of surfing with Facebook, and to grow the audience for the benefit of the sport going forward.

But mostly I enjoyed what all those worldwide fans experiencing the WSL’s high-quality coverage of the Corona Open J-Bay on Facebook. They wrote:

Thanks, now that the men’s contest is over and, for the first time in years, I didn’t get to watch anything. 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼

THANKS A LOT, BECAUSE I’M ALMOST POSITIVE THAT THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD WATCHING WSL WOULD MUCH RATHER WATCH ON THE WSL APP THEN HAVING TO LOG INTO FACEBOOK JUST TO WATCH OUR BELOVED SURFING CONTESTS. ALL NIGHT LONG FACEBOOK WAS BUFFERING AND KICKING ME OUT AND IT WAS REALLY IRRITATING TO SAY THE LEAST. IF THIS PROBLEM CANT GET FIXED HOW ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO WATCH IT.

IF I HAVE TO ID RATHER PAY FOR A SMALL SUBSCRIPTION TO WSL THEN TO HAVE TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH FACEBOOK.

Facebook it is the worst ever, with a lot of cracks, please back to the last transmition or use the youtube for it, they are much better!!

anybody with a spine will not do facecrook, only the spineless will eat this crap. been watching wsl since it first hit the net and now to hear that they bent over for facecook

Facebook and the wallet of WSL’s CEO will be the only ones who will benefit from this new partnership! The number of new “surf fans” the WSL gains through Facebook will be minimal compared to the number of fans it will lose from its core audience by alienating them. On the other hand, any surfer who decides to signup for Facebook will end up being a net gain for Facesuck… Good luck WSL!

At last a bit of sanity prevails, the damage that going to Facebook has done to our sport is disgusting. Sophie and the rest of the hierarchy at WSL give yourselves an F for Failure for your ridiculous decision about Facebook. We the spectators of a beautiful sport will give you a small tick of approval for going back to your normal broadcast, but we won’t accept the rubbish you are attempting to force upon us. Spectators maintain the rage, weight of numbers have toppled governments, stopped wars and we can win this battle.

WSL you lost me as a viewer. Such a shame to see this direction your going.

Etc.

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Staggering: “Thousands” tune in to J-Bay Women!

By Derek Rielly

6 years ago

Click to reveal the popularity, staggering or otherwise, of women's pro surfing v the men…

Transparency is a fine thing, in biz, relationships and so forth. Until it isn’t.

And just as YouTube views demonstrated a less than y0u’d expect viewership of WSL event clips, Facebook Live has done something no other app, news organisation or company has been able to do: directly compare viewership numbers between the men’s and women’s events at J-Bay.

This would normally be little more than a curio, a side-note, if it weren’t for the fury over a recent junior event where the winner of the girl’s received a winner’s cheque that was exactly half her male counterpart.

(In little-boy-standing-on-the-corner-with-newspaper-bag voice, “Reeeeeeead all about it!”)

So, in similar waves, on the same week, with the same infrastructure, how did the women rate against the men? I figured it’d be roughly half. Five k or so. I don’t miss a heat with Carissa, Gilmore, Ho or Peterson. The rest I don’t watch. By force of numbers I presumed the men would be twice as popular.

From a glitchy start (don’t worry, I called around to see if it was just my connection), numbers hovered around 500, gradually got to a thousand, climbed…climbed…and peaked, as far as I could see, at around 2200 heads watching the English feed.

The best I saw on the Spanish feed was 302. The Portuguese around 350.

I emailed a pal in the UK who replied: “Ok, you ready for this. In a marquee Rd 2 match up between Carissa and Courtney, the numbers are hovering between 240-270! Staggering.”

It’s here the WSL will interject, of course, and remind us that these numbers are geographically specific. Two thousand in Australia, 302 Spanish viewers in Australia, 350 Portuguese and Brazilians watching in Australia and so on.

And, yet, in the Australian feed.

“Hello from sunny Ireland!” wrote Paddy Keane.

And the names of fans liking the feed were distinctly monocultural. Was Australia’s famously surf-crazy Arabic community all tuned in to the women? Hello Mustapha! Hello Fatima!

At some point during the feed, the WSL switched their app back onto live streaming.

Did that drain the viewer numbers?

In Australia, was the nation tuned into the broadcast on Fox Sports?

A few minutes ago, and unprompted, a noted professional surfer texted me and asked: “Is the WSL or dead or is FB that’s dead? Or both? So fascinating how podcasts are so much bigger than everything.”

Still, the numbers aren’t definitive. Tonight, howevs, and thanks to an IT pro, we’re going to get numbers from every continent.

Stay tuned, as they say in the classics.

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Apply: Keep your favorite break pristine!

By Chas Smith

6 years ago

No ugly hotels or nasty tourist camps!

Are you proud of your local break? Like, really really proud? When someone asks, “Where do you surf?” do you tilt your head back, puff out your chest and say, “D Street, bro.” Or do you hate surf your local break? Like, grimace and complain and slap the water and be all annoyed?

Well, if you are the former did you know that you can kick big bizness in the balls and set it up as a World Surfing Reserve? It’s true!

A fine group called the Save the Waves Coalition has a process where you can apply for your break to be recognized. It will proudly appear alongside current surf reserves Malibu, Ericeira (Portugal), Manly Beach (Nick Carrol), Santa Cruz, Huanchaco (Peru), Bahia Todos Santos (Mexico), Punta de Lobos (Chile), Gold Coast, Noosa and Guarda do Embau (Brazil).

How difficult is? Well savethewaves.org has a tab on its website that walks you right through. Before beginning maybe take a few moments to discern if your local meets the criteria.

1) Quality and Consistency of the wave(s)

QUALITY OF WAVE(S)
SURFEABLE DAYS / YEAR
SITE OF PRO CONTEST
WAVE VARIETY

2) Environmental characteristics

RECOGNIZED BIODIVERSITY HOTSPOT
THREATENED SPECIES PRESENT
CONNECTED TO WATER RESOURCES
PAST/PRESENT WAVE THREAT LIKELY TO BE MITIGATED
PROTECTED DESIGNATIONS
UNDEVELOPED AREA
KEY ISSUE IDENTIFIED
CLEAR AVENUE FOR LEGAL PROTECTION LOCALLY
PROVIDES KEY ECOSYSTEM SERVICES

3) Culture and Surf history

SITE OF NAT’L CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE
IMPORTANCE IN SURF HISTORY
SITE OF REGIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

4) Capacity and local support

LETTERS OF SUPPORT FROM:
SURF COMMUNITY
GOV’T SUPPORT
NGOS
BUSINESS
ACADEMIA
SUSTAINABLE FINANCING
CLEARLY IDENTIFIED MANAGER
SURF IS KEY PART OF LOCAL ECONOMY
CLEARLY IDENTIFIED RESERVE AMBASSADOR

D Street? Are you ready to shine?

Apply here!

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"You do all this crazy shit your whole career, crazy waves, sitting yourself on fire, and you almost die at one-foot Waikiki. Death is a stone's throw away, always, but to realise that. I was overwhelmed. It was one of the heaviest moments of my life. I still trip out when I watch the clip." @whoisjob

Jamie O’Brien: “I almost died at one-foot Waikiki!’

By Derek Rielly

6 years ago

"Death is always just a stone's throw away," says Jamie.

Who knows when the reaper will strike? He lurks, as you must be aware by now, around every corner.

A moment’s distraction crossing the road meets a driver answering an email. A punch you don’t see coming outside a bar. A shooter in a cinema. A religious nut pops his belt on a train.

The Hawaiian surfer Jamie O’Brien, daddy of the insanely popular WhoisJob series with Red Bull, almost bought the farm, as they say, on June 9, his thirty-fifth birthday.

Fooling around in Waikiki, as part of his new YouTube vlog, Jamie was examining an interesting rock on a breakwall and “stating the obvious,” says Jamie, “I turned my back on the ocean. Honestly, I had put my hand up in front of my face at the last second and I face-planted into my hand. It almost knocked me out just hitting my hand. I almost died at one-foot Waikiki. I almost died at one-foot Waikiki. Frick. I got so lucky.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BkyGjKIDQZI/?hl=en&taken-by=whoisjob

Jamie says the incident knocked him around mentally and continues to haunt him.

“I was thinking about it a lot. You do all this crazy shit your whole career, crazy waves, sitting yourself on fire, and you almost die at one-foot Waikiki. Death is a stone’s throw away, always, but to realise that. I was overwhelmed. It was one of the heaviest moments of my life. I still trip out when I watch the clip. That night, I was laying in bed, thinking, that I almost died at Waikiki. Literally.”

On the upside, engagement on his Instagram post was excellent.

“I knew I had a really good clip on my hands,” says Jamie. “People were psyched. It had a tonne of engagement.”

But, still, “It’s hard not to take something like that seriously. You always wonder in life, when am I going to die? And then it almost happens. Frick.”

(Editor’s note: Jamie created his new vlog as a way of getting a piece of the YouTube pie and to show fans more of his day-to-day life, rather than the big Red Bull strike missions for his show. “We film with Red Bull then we don’t have anything to do for five months. This shows a little more of me and how we have fun.”)

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Stephanie Gilmore, the crossover superstar at the centre of the narrative: just how popular is women's surfing compared to men. | Photo: WSL

Tonight: WSL and Facebook to reveal popularity of women’s surfing!

By Derek Rielly

6 years ago

Scenario: Facebook Live reveals women's surfing to be twice as popular as the men. What happens next?

Do you remember the melodrama six days ago when event organisers of the Ballito Pro Junior photographed the male and female winners side by the side, the boy holding a winner’s cheque double the girl’s?

Revisit that scenario here.

And here.

Mmmmmm, one more.

Wait! And here.

The prevailing narrative was that this was further evidence, as if further evidence was necessary, of the brutal patriarchy that keeps women’s necks under the jackboot of “straight white males.” That women must work twice as hard to earn the same money and so on.

The counter-argument was…mmmm…half the competitors means half the money. Don’t matter if you dick or pussy. It’s a numbers game.

But then, how many girls are in the top 100 paid athletes in the world?

Zero.

Misogyny!

Simplistic?

Yeah, it is. H0w many gals you know park ’emselves on the couch to watch the game? Or throw their livers away at sports bars, eyeballs glued to giant wall-mounted televisions? Men like to watch men.

Anyway, tonight, thanks to the WSL’s collaboration with Facebook, the lingering question…how popular is women’s surfing compared to the jocks?…is going to be answered.

Definitively.

That little number in the top left corner?

During the men’s event at J-Bay, it hovered around ten k and peaked at twenty-ish during the finals.

Let’s imagine the scenarios.

Steph and Carissa paddle out in luminous green four-to-six-foot alls and it hits forty k.

Does that mean women should have their prizemoney doubled?

They paddle out and it scratches five k.

Halved?

I watch with great interest and I encourage you to do the same.

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Eat beach grit spam!