Sports Illustrated/CNN - testing the ultimate market?

if you read RSD perhaps you may have noticed an interesteding trend recently. there have been 3 posts this month with links to articles on the Sports Illustrated blog - SIoncampus.com

but i digress... for years upon years upon years (since the very inception of ultimate itself) there has always been talk of corporate sponsorship, national recognition, coverage from ESPN and the like. and while in other times in the past (background info c/o Ultimate history book) there have been little ripples in the pond it seems as if now there is a bit of a popular wave growing.

CSTV - college sports television now covers the college nationals semis and finals (this year held in Columbus, OH - if ya can go: go!) while it may be a small cable station with few subscribers other than those with very elite satelite packages it is still ultimate being featured (last year in a prime time slot) on tv. its not a humorous side bar "oh look what these crazy kids are doing these days" on the anchors way back to the "real" sports - it is a feature, a centerpiece and apparently something people watch, because CSTV is coming back for a third year i believe?

CSTV draws their coverage from University newspapers from around the country - and as you can see from this page, there were 19 articles written in all of 2005 compared with more than 17 articles written in the first half of 2006. (a side note - if your college runs an article in the school newspaper about your team email CSTV and let them know, more than likely they will put it on the site)

back on current news - SIonCampus, the seemingly somewhat experimental arm of Sports Illustrated now seems to be thoroughly testing the ultimate market - perhaps leading up to some sort of coverage of college nationals?

Since the beginning of May there have been three seperate articles - mostly feature type pieces, or ones looking for reader input - but three articles nonetheless.

Depending on the amount of hits the site received for those articles, compared with whatever else they are covering i wouldnt be surprised at all if they began to expand their coverage as a whole of the sport in the future.

Its all about the money. If people can make money from advertisements - bring people in to read those articles, and thus expose them to advertising, then it will continue and grow. So who is going to advertise to people who read ultimate articles? Thats the question. Once you can answer that definitively (and see in real life that said company is in fact interested) you will see an exponential growth in ultimate coverage.

So perhaps this is the start of something cool? Ya never know, but at least its nice to see a disc on a website run by sports illustrated.

Links:
Beloit breaks world record
Michigan women
Ultimate college sport