VLOGGING
Ryan Goloversic AKA Rygo INTERVIEW BY JOHN BRYJA / PHOTOS KRISTEN COOPER AND HILARY HUFFMAN
In this new series for 2020, Kitesurfing Magazine explores the world of kitesurfing video blogs. What makes for a successful video? How can we all make better videos? Kitesurfing Magazine tracks down the personalities behind kitesurfing’s most popular video blogs, and finds out their secrets for success. For this issue Michigan videographer and editor Ryan Goloversic shares his story. Office on the road in the Florida Keys.
How did you get into kite vlogging? Ryan Goloversic: The short version of the story starts in 2016. Five years prior, I had left my career to pursue freelance videography in the kite industry. It turned out to be a wild ride because the industry and videography were changing fast! What was once a unique and high-demand skill was becoming something everyone had access to. Luckily for me, I stepped into a content creation role for MACkite, and Steve Negen, the founder, was open to trying new things and giving people a shot. I was given the opportunity to create videos. MACkite’s marketing director, Jake Vanderzee, asked me to start doing vlogs for the shop. I thought about it and decided to build a team of vloggers, each sharing their lifestyle and helping people within their areas of expertise.
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I teamed up with Blake Olsen, Crystal Veness and Tucker Vantol. The rest is history. We had Blake on trick tips, Crystal doing a travel guide and Tucker was the hydrofoil guru. I would function as a producer, planning content, filming and editing. I would also handle reviews and behind-the-scenes vlogs to share the adventure with everyone. What have been your most popular videos or topics that you covered? In a word, kiteloops! Beyond that, tutorials always do well, as does content that sheds new light on a subject. It seems that as long as we give the topic at hand the attention it deserves and genuinely aim to help people, there is always someone who will appreciate it.
Are you ever surprised by what goes viral? I wouldn’t say we’ve ever had a viral video, but I have been caught off guard. Sometimes a completely random topic will blow up. Blake did a video on how to trim your kite and people came out of the woodwork in droves. I did a comparison of board shapes, sizing and construction. That also received a surprising amount of views. More often than not, I know a video will do well before we even film it. Blake and I wrote up a video titled 5 Steps to Better Kite Control and that has been a top performer for years. Do you have a love or a hate relationship with the YouTube algorithm? I’m 100 per cent neutral on this topic. At the end of the day, you have to cater to the machine and to the humans using the
