Frequently Asked Questions

How will potential readers find the magazine? And where or how will it be advertised?

Readers find us in a wide variety of ways.

• Word-of-mouth. Drift will be the place to go for snowkiting content and the word is already quickly spreading among the snowkiting community. We have had people from many countries inquiring about the first issue.
• Industry contacts. We have a growing list of key snowkite industry people around the world that include manufacturers, shops, schools, contributing writers and photographers, pro riders, snowkite enthusiasts and non-snowkiters.
• Subscriptions. Free subscriptions will be available through a form that we will use to create a database of readers.
• RSS. RSS feeds from our website will keep interested readers and new readers with the latest information online, in the magazine, at events and in the film(s).
• Newsletter. We will periodically send out a newsletter to subscribers to let them know about new website content, including when the magazine is posted for download.
• Google Adwords. We will be deploying targeted advertising campaigns via Google AdWords to attract audience to our content products as they search via Google and on other search engines. By targeting specific keywords and phrases for each campaign, we can connect with specific audiences including existing snowkiters, kiters who don’t currently snowkite and winter sports enthusiasts who haven’t tried snowkiting. This method is a key to drawing the attention of non-kiters from other related sports such as windsurfing, wakeboarding, snowboarding, skiing, paragliding. We are also developing banner ad campaigns specifically designed to catch the attention of these crossover athletes. This is an area that snowkite companies have been talking about for years, but haven’t had the focus or resources to target. Drift is in a position to make that push for the industry. We will have direct links to your website/s of choice, which can be translated into direct sales. Our ability to track traffic is a bonus over printed magazines.
• Search Engine Optimization. Our websites utilize Search Engine Optimization techniques and technologies to enhance and increase our page rank in Google and other search engines enabling people to find our innovative and exceptional content.
• Banner Ads. We are buying banner ad space on sites such as Snowkiting.com, KiteForum.com, KiteCommunity.com and many other kite and extreme sport related sites too exhaustive to list here.
• Events. We will be organizing and sponsoring a variety of events where we will have banners, flags and swag to build the brand and drive traffic to the magazine and website. In addition, we are creating a custom printed flyer with teaser information and the website address. We are currently organizing the 2nd Annual Snowkite Summit which is a key part of solidifying the industry and will give us an additional opportunity to get the word out.
• Film. We will be working on a full-length film and creating teasers for it, as well as stand-alone viral video clips that will be posted on YouTube and similar sites. We will make them available for anyone to post on their website.
• Press-releases. We will send out press-release to various media sources about events and happenings in the industry.
• Trade-shows. We have and will be attending key tradeshows to promote the magazine.

How many readers are you anticipating and how will you keep them coming back?

There are an estimated 100,000 kite sport enthusiasts world-wide and 10% of them currently snowkite. There are an estimated 10 million active snowboarders in North America and more than double that globally with a similar number of skiers. This large and currently untapped audience is focused on the latest and greatest content and snowkiting will be that new frontier.  Our 3-season projections conservatively put us more than 30,000 active consumers of our content (less than 1% of global snow sport enthusiasts) with an expected entrance into the market at an estimated 10,000 active content consumers for the first season.

When James Brown started The Kiteboarder Magazine with Ryan Riccitelli back in 2004, The Kiteboarder decided to post the PDF online for free, a few weeks following the paid-for, printed magazine that went out to shops, industry VIP’s and subscribers. The other magazines were using old thinking and not posting online. We were printing about 5,000 copies at the time and Ryan called one day to excitedly report that they’d had over 20,000 downloads world-wide of a single issue. That statistic demonstrates the power and advantages of the internet. Also, based on statistics from snowkiting.com, we can easily expect over 6,000 unique visitors simply by linking from that site alone.

Since we are creating a suite of snowkiting content products, we can drive consumers between our content products and provide them with a complete package of information that always has new, important and innovative content. If a consumer finds us via our videos first, we will drive them to our magazine via our website to expand on the content they found initially. The same goes in the other directions as well.

Continually updating the site and magazine with new content will keep readers coming back for more. In order to keep content fresh, we have built a network of contributors and have budgeted a significant portion of ad dollars towards paying them. We will set up blogs for a select group to contribute on a regular basis. Following current trends, we will be giving away the content for free, which will quickly build an audience.

What are the advantages of digital distribution?

The worldwide trend has been shifting away from print to web distribution so we did some careful analysis and saw the huge performance and tracking advantages of going digital. We knew that there is a substantial cost to printing and shipping. Shipping to other countries is especially prohibitive and we didn’t want to leave out any of the snowkiters around the world. We all know that people are doing research about products online and many make their final purchases online as well. So having a solid presence on the web makes sense. We also didn’t know what kind of support we would get from advertisers so the financial burden. And the reach is global. So those factors took us in the digital direction.

The distribution of print would be limited to shops and subscribers and anyone who might see their copies. It is a bit of a vacuum that limits us mostly to existing snowkiters. There is also no way to track traffic in print. Customizing the magazine to be digital on the web will get more bang for your buck and allow for dynamic features such as links to your website, link tracking and page view tracking in addition to the ability to embed video, link to the Drift website for more information or link directly to a retailer directory or shopping cart. That said, we may eventually do a print version in the future, if the industry can support it. We may be closer than we think.

How will Drift impact the sport of snowkiting?

This is an exciting new venture for everyone involved–Drift, advertisers, contributors and readers. We still have a few unanswered questions at this stage, but we know from speaking to people since before we started this venture a year ago, that we all want and need a media source like Drift to bring the global snowkite community together and to build the sport. The time has come to make it a reality. Drift’s website, magazine, films and events are a powerful tool for drawing attention to the sport. We realize that your advertising dollars are valuable and you need to see a return. Our personal investments in time and money to get Drift off the ground have been substantial, and we have come to this point because we believe in the viability of our suite of products for advertisers. We are nearing completion of the first issue of the magazine and as an advertiser you have the opportunity to get in on the ground level to establish yourself as an industry leader along with Drift. Keep in mind that every issue will be available for download at any time in the future, so new readers years from now will be able to look back and see that you have been an industry leader from the start.

Drift will also help legitimize the sport when readers see all the players involved. One look at the Gear Guide in our sample issue and you realize how big snowkiting has become across the globe. There just hasn’t been an outlet for everyone until Drift came along to showcase the sport.