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In light of what’s been happening in the bodyboarding world (the shutdown of Bodyboarding Magazine, customer service problems with No Friends, etc.), I thought it might be worthwhile to address a few things that are going to be critical to the future of bodyboarding.

Most importantly, I think it’s essential to realize that all of these recent happenings are interrelated. Let’s start with the folding of Bodyboarding Magazine. First and foremost it’s probably happening because the Magazine isn’t turning a profit.

Magazines need to sell advertisements in order to stay solvent, but any of you who have been around for more than the last five years know that the number of ads have been shrinking more and more every issue for years. It’s funny that someone said that the Wedge & Puerto issue would be scrapped if the Mag is kaput because I just found an old Aug/Sept 1988 Summer issue with a Puerto feature and it is 148 pages (!) compared to the Oct/Nov 2002 issue with 76 pages. Roughly speaking, that’s twice the amount of advertisers for the same mag and big-time advertisers, too, like (can you believe it?) Free Style, Life’s a Beach, O’Neill, Gotcha, Quiksilver, Reef, T&C, Body Glove, Vaurnet, Rusty and Santa Cruz. This doesn’t even include the BBing companies. So what happened over the past 14 years?

I’m not a sales guy, so I can’t attest to how soft the market has gotten for advertising sales overall, but I can make a general statement regarding why it might have happened. Back then, bodyboarding was looked at as just another form of wave riding, not as the red-headed stepchild of surfing. Advertisers saw that there was a solid market for their surf-related products, not just BBing equipment. Now, BBing for the most part is looked at as a kiddie sport, as the training wheels for "real" surfing. Bodyboarding Magazine, instead of trying to broaden its appeal beyond a 12-16 year-old demographic, almost completely focused on the youngest end of the spectrum.

Now this isn’t a jab at the groms out there, but it certainly is at the people who made the conscious decision to make Bodyboarding Magazine the Teen Beat of wave riding. Why would any non-BBing surf-related company want to advertise in a magazine that was totally geared toward kids? In their eyes advertising in Bodyboarding Magazine they would be seen as less-core, less-real and much less a player in the surf industry. As the big players started to pull their ads (and their big advertising $, too) out of the magazine, others followed until all that was left was a Playstation 2 ad and a Surfrider piece.

Now I’m not saying that in order to be successful, the new incarnation of Bodyboarding Magazine needs to look like The Surfers Journal, but why can’t it look more like, say, Surfer? In order to keep the ball rolling, Bodyboarding Magazine has to target the folks out here who have been riding for twenty years as well as the people who just got their 1st board from ebodyboarding.com. They need to realize that the people with the $ aren’t necessarily the groms, but their parents who sponge, their older brothers and sisters, etc. They have to realize that unless they’re looking to put out yet another single-use disposable rag, they’re going to have to bring the level of the mag up a notch from the pubescent rag that exists now into something both the youngins and us old farts can enjoy. It has to appeal to Jr. High students as well as Juniors in College. Could it be that hard?

When I was a kid, I used to love looking at old issues of Surfer magazine. I’d comb over back issues and eat up the stories as well as the pictures. I’d read about the characters of the sport, the exotic places they’d travel to and the lifestyle that they loved so much. All this and I had never even ridden stand-up in my entire life except for screwing around on a longboard. It didn’t matter one bit that they were talking about "surfers" because the stories and features spoke to all wave riders of all ages.

Now, with more than two decades of hard-core bodyboarding under our collective belt, Bodyboarding Magazine was focusing on pre-teen fluff instead of anything substantial that could carry it into the 21st century. It was doomed to fail because, among other things, it ignored the most influential members of its tribe. Where were Severson, Caldwell and Reale in the magazine? Why does Keith have a column on Jay’s site and not in Bodyboarding Magazine? How can we ignore everything that Neal Miyake has done to promote the aloha spirit for bodyboarding? How did we manage to let all of these resources slip by and not use them for the betterment of the sport and the magazine?

I know that there were tons of issues I can’t even imagine that the editors/publishers of Bodyboarding Magazine had to go through and I respect what they’ve tried to do, but I think my criticisms are legitimate and well founded.

Now as far as the whole NF deal and its relation to the downfall of the Mag, does it take much of a stretch of the imagination to see how slack, uninspired business practices might affect the people that buy BBing related products? Certainly we’d all agree that until NF (and any other less-than-perfect BBing company) gets their act together, what’s to stop bodyboarders from buying the big boy’s products? I’m all for buying BBing-related company’s gear, but if it means I’m going to have to wait three weeks longer to get my stuff than usual, if it means the stuff isn’t going to be of the same quality, and if it means the customer service is going to be belligerent and not the least bit helpful, I can see why people might shop elsewhere. (I hope no one thinks I’m singling out NF, but they just happened to be the ones in the limelight when I wrote this.)

Now when people don’t buy BBing-related gear from these companies because they think they’re going to get a raw deal, the companies don’t buy ads in Bodyboarding Magazine because they can’t afford it. If no one is buying ads in Bodyboarding Magazine, Bodyboarding Magazine can’t pay its bills and we come full circle.

Think about it... Bodyboarding from a numbers perspective is bigger than it’s ever been. There are more boards sold, more riders being geared up, more moms and dads being dragged down to the Alternative Surf/Action Beaches of the world now more than ever. Jay Reale has himself a nice little business with a solid core of customers that epitomizes what customer service is all about. The level of riding is more insane than ever with guys pulling stuff that fogies like me couldn’t have even imagined in our wildest dreams. So what’s stopping us from taking this to the next level?

Anyone? Buhler? Buhler?