Today we take a look at Absolutely Radical, the World’s first snowboard magazine. Here are a few things we learned.

• Snowboarding magazines today are 328% more expensive but on the plus side you do get 820% more pages.
• The first edition of Absolutely Radical featured 61% of all the people who have ever received a Transworld Snowboarding Legend Award.
• Modern snowboards are 2.5 times more expensive and yet they are also about $9,500 cheaper.
• Halfpipes are 2.7 times higher, but they are also approximately 2.7 times softer as they are considerably less covered in shit loads of moguls

Come with us now on a journey of historical discovery…

Back in May the Angry Snowboarder wrote an editorial called “Played Out Marketing Pitches” where he rounded on some of the snowboard companies that use pointlessly generic sales pitches such as “by riders, for riders” and “putting the fun back into snowboarding” to sell their kit. One of the things he mentioned in that article was a company called Monson which builds snowboards for a whole bunch of brands who then flog the same snowboard to the public dressed up in a different graphic and smothered in great steaming piles of marketing crap. A few months down the line and with a new season upon us we thought it would be interesting to see how each of the companies  are selling this year’s fresh crop of Monson snowboards. 

As the Angry Snowboarder says in that article, “If you’re going to run a company you seriously need to bring something to the table beyond played out pitches and cookie cutter technology, otherwise it’s just a different graphic on the same old shit”. To test out whether people were following that sage advice we tracked one particular Monson board, the ‘C6’, to see what spin each brand put on their marketing of that board and what price they gave it. We found 11 different ways you can buy the same board, epic lashings of sales diarrhoea and amazingly depending on who you buy from you could spend anything between $300 and $570 on exactly the same snowboard…

After scraping the sordid depths of the snowboarding world with last week’s smutfest we’ve gone all highbrow this week and are reviewing a book. Wear that, newly acquired and now thoroughly disappointed audience.

Normally when we review books we judge them almost solely on the cover and although this one has a nice enough cover what really drew our attention was the weight…

Fact: People absolutely love snowboarding gear guides.

It must be true. Last year our first gear guide became easily our most read article, accounting for 13% of all the visits to the site. Every day people continue to arrive in their hundreds just to enjoy that article and learn more about last year’s snowboarding gear. The only odd thing is that they don’t spend long reading the article and in under 2 minutes they’re done. 

We want to make sure we provide the quality content our readers demand so without further ado, for all you gear guide fans, here is this year’s guide…

With the gear guides and snowboard review season in full swing and people contemplating their next snowboard purchase its the time of year we hear a lot of blag from a plethora of snowboard companies about why their company is better than everyone else's, as they try to make their products stand out in a busy marketplace. To try and make sense of some of these claims we wanted to find a way to display the background of the different companies so that we could really see how they all compare.


We've spent the last few days researching the company histories of the major snowboard makers and putting it all into a pretty infographic. From the chart you can see how old the companies are, how long they've been making snowboards, which companies are independent and which are owned or licensed by other companies. Some of the things we found surprised us...

Jonathan Beilke is a web developer for Active Sports Inc, the people who run The House and TruSnow snowboard webstores. In his spare time Jon steals the content from this blog and uses it to run a muggy little affiliate website. We contacted Jon two weeks ago asking him nicely to remove our content from his site, but so far there’s been no reply and no change. Assuming he just doesn’t read his emails we figured the best way to get Jon’s attention would be to write an article about him and his shady side business and make sure it appears in the one place we’re sure he’ll notice - all over his own site…

Shaun White rakes in about $9million a year for this snowboarding lark according to Forbes magazine. A top snowboard pro like White can earn about $100,000 a year in prize money and that makes up just over 1% of the the pot, the other 99% comes from sponsorships. To put things into context, Shaun White earned more money in 2008 from endorsements than every single baseball player and every American football player except for Payton Manning.

Shaun White appeals to a type of audience that is not normally interested in snowboarding and because of that he is attractive to companies from outside snowboarding looking to appeal to that wider audience. You can see that reflected in a list of his major sponsors, it's an eclectic mix that no other snowboarder comes close to matching; Burton, Target, BF Goodrich, Oakley, Ubisoft, Vail Resorts, Red Bull and Hewlett Packard.

In a similar way that Shaun White appeals to people and advertisers outside of the sport, snowboarding itself has that ability. Ever since snowboarding started to push its way into popular culture advertisers with nothing do with the sport have been keen to jump on the bandwagon. Today we take a look at some of the most interesting TV commercials that have come out of this uneasy relationship...

Earlier in the month a drunken member of the US skiing team was dropped from the team after he pissed on a 12-year-old girl during an overnight flight - a story covered by the New York Post in an article titled “Urine Big Trouble!”. 18-year-old Robert Vietze was also hit with a federal indecent-exposure charge and could face a year in prison and a $1,000 fine if he is convicted. 

In strangely coincidental news just one week later the actor Gerard Depardieu also found himself in trouble after relieving himself on a plane in France. 

This got us thinking; what kind of legal trouble have snowboarders got themselves into over the years? This week we’ve lined-up a veritable rogue’s gallery of snowboarding miscreants who have run afoul of the law for a range of criminal misdeeds…

It's mid August and already the first gear guides are in the shops. That's the internationally recognised warning sign that we’ll  soon have to pick up our blog production above our lackadaisical summer levels.

The fist magazine to come our way was Onboard's 2011/2012 gear guide and from our first cursory leaf through it looks like there’s a few other people still working on summer time in the snowboard marketing industry. Here's a few of the misguided advertising campaigns you can look forward to seeing in the early days of the new season...

Etsy has been around since 2005 offering a cosy online marketplace for people looking to sell handmade and vintage stuff. It's taken a while for them to get around to selling snowboarding paraphernalia but now there's an impressive array of tat available that you never knew you wanted. Let's take a look what you can get for your cold hard cash...