This story touches upon several questions that have been circulating the paintball world for a while now:
What is Pacific Paintball doing with their media properties?
What’s happening to paintball print media in general?
Why has it taken Pacific so long to make this move?
Why did virtually every paintball company with a decent advertising budget pull/not renew their ads from most outlets until some ‘vague’ new season arrives?
First – cudos to John Amodea. John’s been doing journeyman duty in the paintball magazine biz for – oh, at least 15 years now.
First at the helm of Paintball Consumer Reports (which morphed into PCRI under pressure from Consumer Reports Union, owners of the CR trademark), then taking over PB2X and managing to stay in place as it moved from a National Paintball Supply property, through the sale to Kee and finally to Pacific.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve sold several monthly features and feature articles to John over the years.
And, while a bit asidy, no coverage of this move would be complete without mentioning the history of PB2X itself: Originally conceived as a self-aggrandizing marketing, blackmail and propaganda tool by THE HENRYS (we’re contractually obligated to make sure you don’t miss that soiled name from the past) under the title of Paintball Players Bible, the Henrys essentially promised glowing reviews and coverage if you advertised with them and harsh criticism (to say the least) if you refused to advertise with them.
The magazine was retitled to PB2Xtremes to commemorate a ‘new’ tournament series being promoted by THE HENRYS and they eventually got so annoying and troublesome for the entire industry that E. Postorivo (NPS owner), D. Dion-Krischke and several other highly placed industry types bought them out as long as they agreed to sign a ‘we’ll never sully the paintball industry with our presence again’ clause in the contract.
In the interest of even more full disclosure, THE HENRYS asked me to write ‘exclusively’ for them in a bid to garner some degree of legitimacy. They added injury to the insult of asking by not even offering to match what I was getting for penning articles.
Cue John’s tenure at the magazine.
We’ve also known for quite some time that Pacific Paintball (NPPL, XPSL, Paintball.com, PB2X) has seemed more interested in acquiring media properties than just about anything else and then essentially sitting on them; sure, Lasoya was placed in charge of Paintball.com (whatever ‘in charge’ means) but the content over there has been lackluster. PB2X continues to come out and update their website, but the lack of coordination between all of these properties bespoke one of several possible roadblocks – lack of funding, lack of direction, internal strive (reinforced by the ‘removal’ of Shawn Walker – the guy what brung everyone to the dance).
Or, perhaps, simply waiting for the right time and for things to line up. Which has apparently happened, given this announcement.
On the other hand: Splat has gone all digital, PSI has launched a digital edition (and I’ll guess it’s prepatory to losing the print version entirely), PGI – essentially digital; various other ‘rags’ – closed or limping along with a digital edition.
PB2X has good newsstand distribution, and the parent company has at least one highly placed partner (Activision – NPPL Tournament Paintball 09 game) and all of these moves may presage a deeper relationship between paintball (as represented by Pacific) and the electronic gaming community – or a reoganization for purchase. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see Pacific being purchased.
The print magazine itself is dying; print is limited, costs are directly related to commodities that are rising (oil) and advertisers have shifted their focus from print to the internet – and for good reason: print’s audience is limited, ad costs are high. The internet – unlimited audience, ad costs relatively inexpensive.
How long will a print version of PB2X Paintball.com Magazine continue to be viable? I’ll give it a year, even though I want to say 6 months. Will the websites thrive without the print mag? Sure. If PCM only covered the NPPL and its associated properties (players, television show, game, tournaments) they’d still have plenty of new copy on a regular basis.
I will be interested to see what moves they make on the scenario/woodsball side of the equation, as Pacific is still very tournament-centric in its makeup; PB2X has tried to give love to ‘the other half’ of the industry, but players and teams can tell when they’re red-headed stepchildren. And in this case, step-children that are a larger market segment than the first-born.
Why’d everyone pull their ads? (It happened so fast and in such a short period of time that it almost seemed ‘coordinated’, although many of the companies involved are usually seen as arch-competitors.) I wonder if someone called them up and gave them a little bit of a heads up as to the ‘new’ advertising opportunities that would be coming their way…
68Caliber 2.0 