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Tales from the "Dot Com Gold Rush"

The Internet explosion has included several successful surfing websites. Surfermag.com is an excellent website and shows how a website can complement the “newsstand version” to make an even stronger product. See Mavlensmen Interviews on proexchange to learn how Frank Quirarte’s Mavsurfer.com gets a bizillion hits per month. Sean Collins’ Surfline.com -an online weather/surf report-video store with some other stuff for sale, was reportedly bought by “swell.com” for ten million dollars. Swell.com will be a massive website and it has already added veteran photo editor Larry Moore (Flame) of Surfing Magazine and Evan Slater, a five year editor of Surfer Magazine. Surfcheck.com was bought recently also. Owner,Ted Dietz wouldn’t disclose the price but the site was similar to Surfline. Surfcheck gained notoriety for it’s live wave cam coverage of major surfspots worldwide. This inspired VERY STRONG FEELING among locals. Regardless of the pros and cons of live wave cams, the editors of proexchange thought that striking it rich with a video camera and a computer connected to the Internet might prove a point of interest. I had a chance to interview Ted Dietz, Surfcheck.com’s creator, systems administrator, CEO, photographer , janitor etc shortly after he had sold his website. He was stoked about selling his site.

BC: I just heard that Surfcheck is going through a merger or something?
TD: We sold Surfcheck.com just a few moments ago. So I am no longer the owner of Surfcheck. A company called “Hard Cloud” bought it. It’s a group of Internet Guru’s. Some of the names would be; Larry Crow, former CEO of Quicksilver, Jim Hutchens who used to be the publisher of Surfer Magazine, Wayne Tutsiani-he was the guy who took Netscape public. Some pretty heavy guys. They made us an offer about two months ago, in fact, we had four companies trying to buy Surfcheck at the same time.
BC: Are you retired now?
TD: To be really honest with you, I was retired about two years ago. And I was kind of looking for a nice neat little exit strategy for surfcheck.com along with three other businesses that I have as well. And so they’ve all been sold. The weight of the corporate world is off my shoulders for the moment anyway. But I’m not really retired because I’m gonna be hanging out with Hard Cloud for about six months doin a brain dump on everything I know as far as the forecasting and running the cams and setting them up and software and all that kind of stuff. I’ll be involved pretty heavily through summer.
BC: Will you still be the “Cyberkahuna”?
TD: Yeah I will, they want me to keep that persona. They want me to continue to do the radio like I’ve been doing. Basically, business as usual. I just won’t have the day to day management headaches of the website. I do right now, but I’ll be passive. Little by little, pass that off to the staff and they’ve got 46 people at Hardcloud running this thing where it used to be 1. The workload will be a tremendous relief for me anyway.
BC: It must have been alot of work building Surfcheck.com.
TD: It was 7 days a week, up to 12 to 15 hours a day. It was just unbelievable. And you wouldn’t think that a little website like Surfcheck would be so much .... there were so many things to it. You’ve got 15 surfers working for you on reports and all the little problems that happen along the way with the Internet. Every day is something new.
BC: Despite all the controversy, Surfcheck is a very effective use of the Internet.
TD: There’s still those few resistant surfers out there who just think cams are the worst thing in the world.They claim that we’re bringing people to the beaches and we’re crowding up the lineup and all kinds of stuff. I’ve got to be honest with you, I haven’t seen it yet.
BC: I’d like to see the content level cranked up a little more..... by putting “real” photographers out there shooting video from the water. In my opinion, the stationary live cams don’t show the conditions accurately enough.
TD: The next generation that’s coming down, we will be right on top of it, is the Windows Streaming Media. Now the best you can see on surfcheck is about 3 frames a second....that’s on a good day....we’ll pump that up to about 17 frames a second with this new technology. So it will be really close to watching TV. It will be smooth...not silky smooth, but as close as anyone has ever seen.

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BC: “Surf Alert” must be a bosses nightmare..... Do you think it has a negative impact on the American GNP?
TD: I hope that I was part of tearing down the corporate structure of America. I’d get emails from guys saying, “Hey man, you really ruined my day” when I send out a surf alert and said it was goin off. “Man I’m screwed, I’m stuck here at work.” But there have been a few that said, “Oh my stomach hurts”.
BC: People like to check the surf, don’t they?
TD: People like to know from minute to minute to what’s goin on. I think more than anything putting aside the cams for a moment, they like to know if its going off for the weekend. So they can kind of plan their day around surfing or mowing the lawn or washing the car. You’ve give them insight into what’s happening and what’s more important....what’s not happening.
BC: How many stations reported the surf conditions today?
DT: We cover close to a hundred beaches and I’m assuming they’re all updated from Hawaii to California to Costa Rica to everywhere.
BC: How does that compare with a year ago?
TD: It’s about the same....we peaked about two years ago. as far as the number of beaches that we went. In fact we decreased a little bit. I did have some coverage going in South Africa, but it was horribly expensive to keep that going. But they’re coming back... we’ve got J-Bay coming back, Durban... We’ve got Indonesia, we’ve got Australia..We’ve got the East Coast of the United States coming on line. It’s a whole bunch of stuff coming on.
BC: Oh so there’s more stuff coming online?
TD: The whole sites going to be based on video content. Video content and bring in weather and information you need in order to do your individual sport. I have a budget for...get this.....a million bucks in JUST CAMS for the next year and they want EVERY SINGLE PENNY spent on cams....So our initial list is 250 cams. I’m thinking...Holy Shit...how am I going to do this...But I’ve got a fulltime staff now of three guys whose only job is to install cameras..... just GO GO GO GO... GO. But it’s not just surfing. We’ll put cams in all the major ski resorts...snow boards. We’re gonna be doing alot of the BMX areas. We’re doing alot of skate parks right now. In fact, were installing one on monday-to get live feeds of guys doing the ramps or whatever skaters do.
BC: But no cams from the water?
TD: The underwater camera’s exist. There’s one guy in Catalina who was trying to do that. He owns a little ISP in Catalina. He was developing an underwater camera. The problem is running electrical through a protected habitat. It can’t happen. You’ve got to get power to the camera somehow and when you have that particular area...particularly like at Catalina. They won’t let you do it. So that’s the problem.
BC: How did Surfcheck get started?
TD: I started it in about mid 1995. And I did it because I’m a diehard surfer and I surf every day. All my buddies knew that and would call me every morning, asking, “How was it? How was the surf?” And I’d get about a dozen calls every morning. Then my wife said, “This has got to stop” and on a fluke I said, I’m gonna put it on the Internet. And that was when it was just starting out. I had to find out how to convert a video image into a digital image and just took some images of Huntington Beach. The Pier, the cliffs whatever and post it on the Internet. It went ballistic. My first month, I remember, I had 10,000 people visit the site...that was April 1 of 96 when I launched it. In fact I have a picture that my wife took of me that was foresight on her part, it was when I was uploading my very first picture at Surfcheck. So any way, 10,000 my first month, 60,000 my second month. The third month we had a real hot spell come through and a big south swell and it went to 2,000,000 individual people at the site. I thought, I’m onto something here and I expanded it to cover Trestles, we had some Malibu and a few other places. But the problem was, it was costing about 2 grand a month to run the site and it was only bringing about 200/month in income. So life was pretty limited.
BC: You decided to go for subscriptions and not advertising?
TD: We’ll I did have advertisers on it.....but to try; number one to run a website, number two, go out there and shag advertisers, number three, educate the surfing community in the benefits of having video of the surf on the Internet. And finally, just explaining to the surf shops and the target audience what it was all about. It was too new at that point in time. You mention “ad banner” to them and they’ld say, “what’s that? What’s the Internet? how do I get on to that??..”It was just too early. Nobody was ready for it at that point in time. Plus the fact, if you think back then, surfcheck was underground. We got alot of flack, the emails I was getting from people....death threats. In fact, I understand, but I didn’t actually see this...but at Rice Surfboards....there was actually a letter up there, posted on the bulletin board, with a $50 bounty to anybody who could find out who the Cyber Kahuna was.
BC: I heard about the controversy surrounding the live cam in Pacifica. What finally happened?
TD: We’ll first we put the cam up at the pump house. It was stolen like two days later. And the city was who was pushing us to put it in there. They said, “We’re sorry. What we’ll do is give you free rent for the next camera that you put up to recoup your losses on the camera” and I thought, “damn that was cool.” Then they decided to make a public forum out of it and bring out the city council. And the next thing I know there’s CNN wanting to do an interview with me at Malibu. We’re talking... the cameras...the lighting...the whole deal...so we drove up to Malibu and met all these people talking about surf cams and they’re so great and Yadi - Yadi - Yadi. And then they told me “the city council meeting is at TONIGHT....... and they’re expecting you to be there”. And here I am at Malibu at 2:30....talking with these guys....and they said that CNN was gonna be covering the city council meeting. So I drove right from Malibu to Orange County Airport, jumped on a plane and actually made it to the City Council Meeting at 6:30. But there were three TV Stations and CNN at the City Council Meeting.
BC: At Pacifica?
TD: At Pacifica....Because one of the surfers there was a producer for CNN. He lives over by Sharp Park. He was the one that orchestrated that whole thing. Without my even knowing it, the surfers are circulating a petition at the supermarket. I guess at Safeway, they’re trying to gather signatures. And in three days, I think they got 60 signatures. That’s a real landslide...isn’t it. But the City Council gave each of us time to talk. I kind of voiced my opinion as far as surf cams. Their benign effect on the beaches. Well anyway, it came down to five City Council Members and two were for and two were against and so the straw vote was with the mayor...and the mayor voted against it. So that was the end of it. But it made the papers, it was on TV, it went worldwide on CNN. I got emails from people in Costa Rica, Africa people saying, “I saw you on CNN, that’s really cool.”

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BC: Maybe the controversy helped Surfcheck...
TD: Oh, it did. Within weeks I had five offers from people to put in cams...on private residences. Which we did. We put a camera up on those condominiums right there, right across the street from Linda Mar. Then the residents of that complex started getting threats that they were gonna burn their building down, were gonna burn your cars and flatten your tires. They had an association meeting with the Board of Directors there and they asked me to move the cam...with the residents, having some kind of problem there. So at that point, I said, “you know what...there’s friendlier places to go. I don’t really need this”.
BC: Do you think that Surfcheck was just too far ahead of its time?
TD: I think it was, but its finding its time now. People are appreciating what we’ve done. The only time we get flak anymore is when the cams are down. The surf cams have become part of the whole surfing experience. And not specifically for the beach where the cam is but just to give people an idea of what’s going on. I’ll check the Huntington Beach Pier but I won’t surf there, I’ll surf the cliffs. The pier’s an indicator of what the cliffs are going to be like. Likewise for all the other cams that we have. On the south side of the Huntington Pier there are no less than five cams on the southside of the pier by various Internet companies. I still surf that place alone early in the morning. I’ll always have that “Golden Hour” from 5:15 to 6:15 I’m alone. Probably 70% of Surfcheck users and the others now that were free are checking the surf from work. They’re just bored. They’re checking pipeline, they’re checking Costa Rica, whatever. Its just something to do .
BC: Surfcheck is free now, are you changing the business model from subscription to advertising?
TD: Actually now that it’s gone free, they’re not pushing for advertising at all. Primarily, its going to be ecommerce that’s gonna drive it. They haven’t shared with me what their exact vision is gonna be. Really, surfcheck is going to stay “as is” without any advertising at all through April when they launch the actual Hard Cloud site with all the new content and repopulating or redoing the pages of surfcheck. Right now there is just a little flashing logo, a little teaser for Hard Cloud.
BC: Is it still going to be called Surfcheck?
TD: The original idea was that they’re gonna keep the surfcheck brand and have it under the Hardcloud website. In other words, you go to Hardcloud and go here to see your surfcheck. or whatever. But I was just noticing, when I was doing a little tinkering with the site...they’ve removed all the surfcheck logos completely off it.
BC: And you sold the Surfcheck name with the site?
TD: The CyberKahuna, Surfcheck, Surfcams and a couple of other little trademark items went with it as well. They’ve got a staff of about 20 content writers. They’re putting it together right now. Surf, Skate, Snowboard, BMX and Mountain Bike.
BC: Larry Moore quit at Surfing after 30 years. Now he’s working on a new site with Evan Slater, the former editor of Surfer called Swell.com.
TD: Swell.com was one of the companies that wanted to buy surfcheck as well. I met with Sean Collins. Matador funding is the VC that’s putting all this together. I had offers from Surfer Magazine, from Swell.com, Hard Cloud and Broadband Sports all at the same time. All within two weeks.
BC: That’s amazing, we have the Mavsurfer website up here. People have been approaching them with venture capital. I wonder if they are going to be bought up.
TD: More than likely. The Hard Cloud Group is buying one to two websites a week. If you’ve got a website, you’re gonna make some money...That’s the way it is right now. The whole thing is being snapped up by these big companies. It’s a real interesting thing. In the next 6 months, it’s gonna be a real interesting transition as far as surfing and information. I could only take Surfcheck so far, my funds are limited and more importantly my time is limited. And to take Surfcheck to the “next level” I would have to bring in a staff and fund that. I just didn’t want to do that. The whole thing was becoming alot more corporate than I wanted it to be. Surfcheck to me was like a fun little thing I did on the side. And it really turned into more than a fulltime job. That’s not what I really wanted to do. But it actually worked out well. The timing of them coming in to buy me out was perfect timing. It couldn’t have been any better. I can’t tell you how proud I am of the way it happened. I had been envisioning more of the scenario of, “Oh well, I’ll have to shut it down.”....Go away as a failure, that kind of thing. Cause it never was much of an income producer. It made a little bit of money and it’s always been profitable for the last 3 years. But not much. It wouldn’t be worth the number of hours that I put into it. But I kept hoping and hoping and hoping that the subscription model would spike and it would really catch on. But then you’ve got guys like Surfline giving it away for free...and how do you compete with that?? You really can’t. You try and give better content and better coverage but hey ....FREE WINS EVERY TIME!
BC: What do you think Hard Cloud will do with Surfcheck?
TD: They’re going to expand it...Bring in quality content......bring as many eyeballs as they can into it.....by any means that they can.... and sell it to somebody else....or do an IPO.
BC: Wow, that‘s amazing. Thanks alot Ted and congratulations to you and your family on the sale of Surfcheck.

-PROEXCHANGE/Bill Clarke