Idea to publish ski stories snowballs into multimedia outdoor adventure venture

BOULDER – Stellar Transmedia LLC, a new Boulder-based multimedia venture, is using its adventure lifestyle brand to market a wide variety of media including books, magazines, DVDs and Internet sites.

The company is the brainchild of Mike Slone and Philip Drake, who first came together in the hopes of launching a ski magazine. However, the two Web gurus quickly developed a broader approach.

“We decided to launch a full-on media company rather than just a print magazine,” Slone said. “It’s called Transmedia because we are using a lot of different media to build the Stellar brand. The goal is really to use all those mediums to create an adventure lifestyle content and community hub for people.”

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It wasn’t their first experience with the burgeoning world of Web-based media. Slone founded the now defunct adventure sports Web site www.Explore.com in 1997, and later founded a successful Web design firm, Art + Logic Interactive, which now provides much of the infrastructure for Stellar Transmedia. Slone said that by self-funding the site, he and Drake are maintaining their independence.

“We really learned from the mistakes of the dot-com boom,” Slone said. “We’re building a sustainable business. With every venture, we’re making sure it’s profitable instead of getting big funding. It’s important to us to continue to privately fund this operation so we can continue to do what we want and not what an investor wants us to do.”

Slone declined to specify the company’s startup costs, but said that Stellar’s strategic partnership with Art + Logic saved them as much as $100,000 in Internet technology costs. He anticipates that Stellar Transmedia’s will earn close to $200,000 in revenues in its first year through a combination of advertising revenue, technology licensing fees, and book sales.

The company’s first offering has been its Web site, www.stellarmag.com, which opened July 4. The site combines news features, video documentaries and other features of interest to its community of outdoor enthusiasts.

Slone and Drake, the company’s only full-time employees, worked on the site with part-time programmer Kevin Tatroe for more than a year prior to its launch. At the heart of the Stellar site is the dynamic, interactive – and more importantly, proprietary – technology that allows more than 2,000 visitors a day to engage each other via personal blogs, message boards and photo galleries.

“Everything we’ve been building in terms of infrastructure is really technology heavy, and that’s why it takes longer to launch,” Slone explained. “We are the only adventure lifestyle magazine that has this technology. The only other companies that have back-end technology like this are blogging companies that are simply pure social networking companies.”

Stellar already has licensed the technology to clients like Powder magazine and is actively seeking partners to further expand its reach.

“It’s really tough for companies to start online communities,” Slone said. “We will private label our entire community technology for them to use.”

The company offers a number of pricing models for its technology. The most basic, a privately labeled gateway to Stellar’s community, earns a startup fee ranging from $1,500 to $5,000 plus a fee per user. A completely separate community powered by Stellar’s system costs $15,000 to set up, plus annual licensing fees.

It’s just one of the revenue streams that Stellar is developing. In addition to licensing their community technology, Slone and Drake are launching a resorts site, www.stellarresorts.com, whose services they will be offering free to ski resorts during the first year.

The Stellar Magazine Web site doesn’t include a subscription fee, but it has the potential to become a source of revenue from passionate bloggers, who will pay as little as $4 a month for the privilege.

“We give users the full ability to use Stellar, but there will be people who use it for years and uploads thousands of photos into the system,” Slone explained. “Ultimately, there is a limit on how much disc space and bandwidth someone gets for free. If someone wants to continue using the system, they can pay a monthly fee to get more space.”

They are selectively partnering with major sponsors like The North Face and Patagonia for across-the-board advertising opportunities. Rates range from $25 for a small banner ad to $50,000 for an inclusive “founding sponsorship” package that integrates advertising opportunities across Stellar’s spectrum of products.

“It’s not advertising in the traditional sense,” Slone said. “We’re looking for about 10 strategic partners that we can work with to brand them across all of our publications.”

A host of freelance contributors develops content for the site including in-depth articles and photography. Slone and Drake are working with documentary filmmakers to produce Webumentaries that document the accomplishments of athletes and adventure enthusiasts. Their first effort, “Joe Trek,” chronicled Stellar member Joe Rehana’s trip along the Australian coastline on inline skates. Another documentary “Lost Bags, Lost Souls,” launches in December and covers a fumbled attempt to climb a 20,500-foot summit in the Indian Himalayas.

In the realm of more traditional publishing, Stellar will publish its first book this month. “The Powder Road,” a 240-page coffee-table book, is the story of four friends who traveled from Aspen to Anchorage, Alaska on an epic ski trip. In Stellar fashion, the book will be enhanced by weekly video episodes about the trip posted on www.stellarmag.com.

Each documentary costs between $5,000 and $10,000 to edit and produce, but Stellar is setting its sights even higher. Next year, the company will start production on a sequel to “The Powder Road,” set in South America, with a budget of $150,000.

Next year the company plans to launch Stellar Magazine in print form as an oversized, 140-page quarterly magazine with essays, features and an accompanying DVD. Advertising in the collectible “print annual” will be limited to 10 sponsors per issue with starting rates of $5,000 per full-page advertisement.

“Sometimes people don’t give as much credibility to a Web-only business,” Slone said. “Now, if someone is not particularly into the Web, they will still see our book or the magazine. I think we’re approaching the market in a way that reaches as many people as possible through all these different mediums.”

Meanwhile, the Web site has gained national media attention, and Slone and Drake hope to start syndicating content to outdoor sports sites and other media feeds. Their video profile of skiing legend Scot Schmidt has been picked up by Fox Sports to run on Warren Miller’s show “Snow Motion.”

“It’s a pretty rare case when you have original content created for the Web that is now getting picked up by television,” Slone observed. “Usually it’s the other way around. It really shows the quality of the content that we are creating.”