Hot numbers: WSL reveals potential worldwide audience of 410 million!

What happens when advertisers realise the audience actually consists of, say, Russian bots, or a family in the central Mongolian highlands that will never see the ocean in their life?

Did you, like me, drop your monocle in your martini when the WSL casually claimed in its recent IKEA missive that there are 40 million surfers in the world, with another 370 million ‘interested’ in our sport?

It’s a bold call that seems to be as ambitious as it is unsubstantiated. Three hundred and seventy million people interested in surfing across globe?

Where did that number come from?

Now.

I love hyperbole as much as the next fake internet persona.

But one only has to turn to the daily papers here in Australia to learn of the dangers inherent in duking the stats.

Cricket (national sport of Oz, England, India, Pakistan; like baseball on heroin) found itself in hot water recently when the governing body, Cricketing Australia, was caught out lying about the sport’s national participation numbers… by a cool couple hundred thousand.

Centrist rag The Sydney Morning Herald revealed CA’s claim that 1.65 million Australians play the sport was a “significant overstatement… (that has) been inflated for several years” and is based on nothing more than a “guessing game” on their behalf.

‘Cricket has already been struggling to maintain sponsorship levels and questions over the claim of “1.65 million Australians” could further diminish Cricket Australia’s credibility.’

In terms of scandals for that particular sport, it’s not quite as salacious as the underarm bowling incident of ‘81 that almost sparked a trans-Tasman war between Australia and New Zealand, or the time Australian Test player David Boon drank 52 beers on a single flight from Sydney to London.

But it does serve as a warning to Santa Monica’s high tower.

What happens when the advertisers realise the audience actually consists of, say, Russian bots, or a family in the central Mongolian highlands that will never see the ocean in their life?

So just how many surfers are there in the world?

The ISA puts the number at 23 million, but as Matt Warshaw has already pointed out, it’s all guesswork at best. Counting leaves in a wind tunnel.

Nick Carroll said in the comments the other day that surfers have always made an art form of scamming money from the corporate world.

Is this the Woz sticking to this time-honoured tradition?

Or do they have a peer-reviewed, scientifically-rigorous data set they just haven’t shared with the rest of us yet?

Over to you, E-Lo.