Five Media Things: Rickie as a Director, and How Yoga Has Affected This Blog

As the school year winds down this week and another group of seniors move on to a new phase of life, the college sports year is starting to wind down, too. Baseball, softball and golf still have a few weeks or more left to go, but we’re about to enter the dark days of summer from an OSU athletics perspective.

I do enjoy the rhythm of it all, though. There’s a familiarity to seniors moving on after basketball season with baseball lingering and new freshmen coming in as the football season gets cranking in August. There’s a methodical march to what amounts to funneling thousands of young minds into the American workplace, and it is marked for many of us by the sports calendar. (Want to feel old, by the way? Most of the incoming freshman this fall were not alive for Y2K).

What I’m Excited About

The Rickie Fowler-produced four-part docu-series starts tonight at 9 p.m. on Golf Channel. I talked to Fowler last week about what part of the production process he’s best at.

“Maybe having a little understanding on camera angles and getting to know those better,” said Fowler. “I feel like especially when golf is my profession, understanding where things can be shot from, more so like on the golf-specific side.

“So that’s something that’s been fun to learn along the way, have my own kind of take and two cents on it. But you don’t want to necessarily get in the way of the professionals but maybe give them maybe a little help here and there. It’s been a blast kind of, like I said, getting our feet wet in the space, but golf is still obviously the main priority.”

I’m looking forward to seeing how Part 1 looks tonight.

A Media Thing I Think I Believe

Let’s talk yoga. Wait … yoga? Our family got semi-hooked on Yoga with Adriene at some point last year, and while I’ve moved on to a few other YouTube yoga series, I remain fascinated by both the person and the business model she created.

In some ways, her trajectory (#traj if you follow along in my little golf world) represents what I want ours here at PFB to be. She has sort of upended the traditional model for what it looks like to be a yoga instructor, and while the actual mechanics of what she’s doing — vinyasas and downward dogs — are no different than anyone else, the forum she has put them in has both been refreshing and has thrived.

Now she makes (probably) five figures a month doing something she loves doing.

All Adriene wanted to do was provide free at-home yoga for the masses when most classes cost between $15 and $20. It took her awhile to warm up to the social media circus and SEO-focused video titles.

She wouldn’t disclose her YouTube revenue, but according to analytics firm SocialBlade, Yoga with Adriene pulls in anywhere from $3,000 to $45,000 a month. (It’s a big range, but YouTube estimates are often like that due to complicated ad schemes.) That doesn’t include intake from her subscription video service, Adidas sponsorship, events, or merchandise. She’s currently writing a book about her relationship with yoga and planning her own yoga teacher training program.

“I would love for us to look back and go, ‘Remember when yoga was this thing you went to at the gym, and now it’s like brushing your teeth, washing your vegetables, taking a shower, something that you do in your home regularly,'” she says. “We’re not far from that. I’d like to look back and know that I did my part to trailblaze that offering.” [Mashable]

Remember when we used to get our sports information in the driveway at 6 a.m. every morning and then had to wait another 24 hours to get another dose of it?

We are not exactly reinventing the wheel by having an online sports website (shout out to most males between the ages of 22-42 and especially those in law school), and we’re probably not even disrupting this space as much as Adriene disrupted hers.

But it’s still encouraging to hear stories like that one that challenge the status quo. That makes me (and all of us) think about how the landscape will look five or 10 or 20 years from now and what needs to be done about that in the interim. That excites me.

What I’m Reading

I finished Little Fires Everywhere. It’s as good as advertised. I’m kind of fumbling through what to start next. I’m in the middle of Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me and Stephen King’s A Memoir of the Craft. Both are good for very different reasons so far. I’ve been toying with beginning The Gatekeepers and Herding Tigers. I’m open to any recommendations you guys have, though.

Contribution And Site Updates

We are at 318 contributors. I’m looking forward to even more of you joining in the future.

Site Growth

Pageviews through May 6, 2018: 4.5M
Pageviews through May 6, 2017: 5.1M
Most popular post of May: Mason Rudolph responds to Big Ben
Most popular post of 2018: Spencer out as DC

Website Refresh Update

We haven’t move much in the last week on the website refresh. As we gather some final artwork and move toward the new site, one of the things we’ll be focusing on is organizing our repository of information in a better way. That is, everything is treated the same on this current site. That won’t be true of our new one, which will hopefully make it easier to navigate and provider a better reader experience.