The momentum of professional surfing is REAL!
Let us all, Chris Cote aside, be honest for just one moment. The World Surf League is the greatest comedy show in town. Absurd in a form that would make Franz Kafka absolutely jealous. Andy Kaufman rolling over in his grave recognizing the stunt to end all stunts. From deposed CEO Erik Logan to Jessi Miley-Dyer’s various pantsuits, the “global home of professional surfing” has transitioned to peak ridiculous. More tomorrow on the aforementioned Chief of Sport’s sit down with collaborationist surf media Stab wherein the beloved Carissa Moore is completely pilloried, but today we have the nether regions of a press release.
Namely, the World Surf League claiming, without irony, that 10 million plus souls tuned into the just-wrapped Lower Trestles Finals Day.
25 mil in the “lead up to competition.”
Per the lightly viewed presser:
This is how we stacked up vs. real sport viewing in the United States.
For the win, I suppose.
Do you believe?
Is the “momentum of professional surfing real?”
Calling Erik Logan, wherever you may be…
As to yahoo, there were several sources for same info, but yahoo easy and no paywall worries. As to the numbers themselves, color me massively skeptical … but as you say, maybe.
F#%k the bullshit surf off’s!!!!!!
Carissa Moore , robbed trice now,
And Felipe…. can’t surf pipe or chopes, tail slid his way to victory..
Bunch of crap.
Over this s$%t.
Won’t be watching next year.
Eat a d%$k.
Hope there are zero views why would I want surfing to grow?
You’re getting me mixed up with Pauline Menczer again mate.
I should just let it go, but these crazy numbers actually bug me almost (almost) more than Trestles…(also, after the outage yesterday suddenly the right comments sections keep popping up – assume this is only temporary).
They don’t seem to have a new ‘partner’ for their lauded finals day. Great opportunity for Mrs Palmers to get in on the Final Five.
Maybe an obscure garden shed manufacturer might be keen? Or perhaps a compost producer, seeing they have so much raw material flowing from WSL HQ?
If you scrolled past their post on Twitter……pausing for a split second…….even if you didn’t watch……they probably counted you as a viewer.
I worked at a place that did this. I put together a set of filters to try and achieve the most accurate estimate of genuine human interactions and almost got fired for it. On a slow day, it took out 3/4 of their traffic. All free services do this same thing. As soon as you switch to a subscription or pay-per-view model, everything flips.
hate to inadvertently trigger Otto … but to ya’ll’s point: https://www.yahoo.com/enter…
That’s a good piece. On the counting of the author views point – one of the filters I put in excluded internal views, which weirdly took out a massive half of the traffic (on a slow day). We’d thought we must’ve got something wrong, but it turned out, because the publishing system had a really unreliable preview, most authors were ‘soft-publishing’ their pieces and viewing them live. Then editing, refreshing, editing, refreshing. So yeah, a large chunk of the traffic was the author in edit mode and management didn’t want to know about it.
The average WSL viewer, as counted https://uploads.disquscdn.c… by the WSL
Just checked the WSL website. 4 comments on the finals day, one from serial surf website pest Charles Baer who by the looks of it is the only one engaging in the comments section.
Was Sam one of them?
Even he quit. He did start a fake WSL Negatron account awhile ago in a weak attempt to troll me.
I’m just back from my Charles Baer breathwork circle. Influential guy.
You voting for him and the Global Internet Government in October?
don’t throw the baby out with the bath water? as I previously stated: “ELO is camped out at Lemoore.”
On the day, my kids were watching a charity football (soccer) match live on Youtube while the WSL finals were on. This match was put on the The Sidemen – a group of Youtube influencers – and pitted two teams of Youtube influencers (largely shit at football) against each other. The match filled a 60k stadium in London to capacity and had a livestream audience of >2 million watching. Once it finished, I jumped on to WSL’s Youtube english livestream and saw 26k live viewers watching and a couple of thousand on the beach. Make of that what you will.
The WSL viewership is so incredible that it continues to advertise itself on the ad breaks.
The WSL Comedy Special starring Alec Baldwin as Dirk Ziff, Amy Shumer as Jessi Miley-Dyer and Erik Logan as himself. With special guest hologram Pee Wee Herman as Chris Cote.
Mark Wahlburg as Dirk Ziggler; Heather Graham as ‘rollerskate girl-Dyer’; Luis Guzman as Aguirre; Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Prodan; a Burt Reynold’s Production (think Boogie Nights and/or The Last Movie Star). Soundtrack by Smith, Mandel and Weisberg:
https://youtu.be/pDlZLsJJkV…
I contributed about 20 to that number. That’s the amount of times I turned it on and off in disgust.
Every time you hit mute counts as ten thousand viewers.
That number is as reliable as landing on the correct comment section at Beachgrit.