Bob Kronbauer thought he was living the dream in southern California. It wasn’t until he moved back to Vancouver that he realized he’d got the location all wrong.
An amateur skateboarder, he’d hacked his way into the publishing world by creating his own online magazine, Pacific Skateboarding, and writing for TransWorld Skateboarding, a magazine he’d devoured as a kid growing up in Vernon.
In 1999, when everyone thought dotcoms were revolutionizing how the world did business, a surfing site called Hardcloud.com was spending its way through $9 million in venture capital. It flew Kronbauer down to California and, over a taco lunch, offered to buy Pacific Skateboarder as well as make Kronbauer the editor of its skateboard magazine based in San Clemente.
“OK! Done,” Kronbauer responded without skipping a bite. He was 23 years old and, apart from going pro, the offer put him tantalizingly close to the heart of the skateboard world.
Six months later, Hardcloud was no longer such a freewheeling company. It had blown through its funding and was looking for round-two backers just as the dotcom bubble was bursting, one spectacular headline after another. One day Kronbauer and the rest of the staff were called into a meeting. “That’s it — we’re done,” they were all told. Kronbauer went back to his desk to pack up.
“It was a bummer,” he says, but it didn’t take him long to land a job with L.A.-based Girl Skateboards, a website co-owned by movie director Spike Jonze. Kronbauer worked in the web department, using skills that he’d picked up when some co-workers at Electronic Arts in Vancouver gave him pirated software a few years earlier.
What he hadn’t taken into account was how much his social life had revolved around the people he worked with. He was staring at his computer when he realized that everything he was doing he could do from somewhere else. He thought of how much he’d enjoyed living in Vancouver, however briefly, and decided to move back.
It was 2003. Here was Kronbauer, thrilled to be among the mountains and beaches and yet all around him the conversation was about everything wrong with the city.
“I was, ‘This is the best!’ and everyone else was ‘This is No Fun City,’” he says. “It was like the affordability crisis of today — No Fun City was all the talk.”
To take his mind off all the negativity and work stress, at night he’d find himself on the now defunct CuteOverload.com, boosting his spirits by looking at funny animal photos.
Wouldn’t people like to read things that make them smile about life in Vancouver?
That’s when he decided to create Vancouver Is Awesome. The blog’s celebratory title summed up everything he was feeling about the city — and hoped others would feel inspired by. “I wanted to remind people why they stayed here.”
It wasn’t a quixotic quest. VIA tapped into an eagerness to discover what was good — and fun — about Vancouver. While he worked as a freelance creative director and designer to pay the bills, he was joined by an ever-changing team of volunteer writers who were given an unabashedly simple missive: “Just write about cool stuff.”
As people’s methods of consuming news changed, so did VIA’s approach to serving up its daily happy meals.
“There was a time not that long ago that you’d have your bookmark bar and every morning you’d go to everything you wanted to see,” he says. It’s now switched — content comes directly to most readers through their social media channels.
Today, even though there are ongoing postings, the website acts more like an archive; the real conversation takes place on social media, where VIA has 142,000 Facebook followers, 124,000 Twitter followers and 65,000 Instagram followers.
And conversation it is. VIA is no longer just telling people what is awesome about Vancouver; they’re telling him. For instance, VIA profiles a daily photograph by someone who posts with the #vancouverisawesome hashtag on Instagram. A recent shot of a sparkling city garnered 726 likes. Other regular features include photos of cats, dogs and bikes, as well as Kronbauer’s coffee series which allows him to sit down and talk with people he’s curious about.
One new feature is a partnership with the Vancouver Courier. Starting this week we’ll feature “5 Reasons Vancouver Is Awesome,” in print and online, with content provided by VIA. It’s a way to give our readers ideas about what the city has on offer in the coming week. And once a week, VIA will share five of the Courier’s top stories to let its followers know more about what makes this city tick.
A 2014 collaboration has taken VIA in a whole new direction. Kronbauer partnered with Arsenal Press to publish Vancouver Was Awesome, written by Lani Russwurm. (Kronbauer wrote the introduction.) It sparked a video series, BC Was Awesome: Uncovering Our Curious History with Bob Kronbauer, which had half a million views in its first season, virtually all of them on social. Kronbauer hosts the show with such easygoing affability and genuine curiosity that he’s nominated for a best host Leo award for his episode on Nanaimo’s pirate mayor, Frank Ney, going up against Sophie Lui, Fiona Forbes and Jillian Harris and Todd Talbot.
His natural aptitude, not to mention the neat stories he gets to share, make it his new dream gig. “I just want to keep doing it,” he says, three-quarters of the way into shooting 12 episodes for this fall’s season two. “I get to travel and meet weird people with weird stories. [The producers] set up the episodes, they find all the people and I arrive and knock it down. I’d love this to be my full-time job.”
The word “job” leads to the conversation of how VIA gives away its content for free but earns enough money to pay Kronbauer, his new editor Adam Nanji and Jenn Perutka who manages VIA’s Instagram. The money has to come from somewhere, and that includes sponsored posts as well as partnerships like the one with Telus Optik for BC Was Awesome.
Kronbauer found himself in the centre of a media storm in 2013 when Business in Vancouver reported that Rennie Marketing was paying him $30,000 for a year of weekly VIA posts about Olympic Village, where Kronbauer lives. It was the early days of custom content and Kronbauer thought he’d made it obvious that the posts were sponsored by including a logo but the BIV story sparked an often nasty debate about transparency and media manipulation.
“It was rough. I felt everyone was against me,” he says. “I definitely learned a lesson from it. The reader needs to know the relationship.”
In the end, readers were the debate’s final arbiters. “The people complaining weren’t our readers,” Kronbauer says. VIA’s numbers spiked and continue to climb, even with more sponsored content in the mix.
“People vote with their feet. If you’re so turned off that we have to accept paid advertising, don’t come to our free website. But it also keeps us to a high standard — if people don’t like it they won’t come to us any more.”
He works with clients to convince them that they share the same goal: that if you provide interesting content — not advertising copy — that is relevant to readers, they will click. Readers want to be told, not sold.
To that end, Kronbauer’s been chosen as one of three Canadian “get-outside ambassadors” by Coleman and Canadian Tire. “They’ve commissioned me to create seven pieces of content that are staycation ideas,” he says, revealing the irony that one of the things he loves about Vancouver is how easy it is to leave it for a weekend of camping and fishing with his wife Katie and son Arlo. (Getting out of town is also the number-one favourite among readers, followed by food, history and things to do.)
It’s a business model that keeps him on his toes, just as outfoxing Google’s and Facebook’s algorithms leads to constant finessing of how content is presented.
“It forces us to make better content,” he says. “You have to pay more attention to what people want.”
And people seem to want more of Vancouver’s awesomeness.
mperkins@vancourier.com
