Nitro Circus has pulled yet another stunt. The actions-sports entertainment company signed a deal with Facebook to broadcast 28 events on the social media giant’s Facebook Watch video app.
“The deal really kind of establishes us as a brand, that someone as big as Facebook feels we’ll keep growing and be around for a while,” said Nitro Circus Chief Digital Officer Mike Cowan.
Facebook will air 14 Nitro World Games events and 14 segments from its live tour, featuring competitions in the BMX, freestyle motocross, skate and scooter categories.
Nitro Circus will also produce two web series—Unlocked, which follows up-and-coming action-sports athletes as they battle for a spot at the 2018 Nitro World Games, and a yet-to-be-named production to focus on athletes competing and traveling with the live tour.
The collaboration, which kicks off on Aug. 10 and will wrap up by December, is a “natural extension” of Nitro Circus’ investment in video on Facebook, where it has nearly 20 million followers, according to Cowan.
“We’ve seen a strong community form around action sports on Facebook—and Nitro Circus is a big reason why,” said Facebook Live Sports Programming Lead for North America Devi Mahadevia, adding that, “The brand does an exceptional job of engaging with its fans on the platform.”
The deal is poised to bring “millions more eyeballs coming inside the arena,” and with it more exposure to Nitro Circus’ live event advertisers, which include Fullerton-based Yokohama Tire Corp. Facebook bought the rights to broadcast the content for an undisclosed amount and will pick up revenue from ads on its platform.
So what is Nitro Circus?
The entertainment brand—a relative newcomer to OC—employs 75 at its headquarters in San Clemente and brings in annual revenue of about $50 million, mostly from the more than 100 live shows it puts on every year.
It started out in 2003 as Godfrey Entertainment in a garage in Utah, with Travis Pastrana, Gregg Godfrey and Jeremy Rawle filming each other performing various stunts. The trio partnered with Dickhouse Productions, the maker of the “Jackass” show, and sold the first Nitro Circus TV series to MTV. Two “hugely successful” seasons followed, and “Nitro Circus” became one of the highest-rated shows on MTV at the time, according to President Andy Edwards, who along with former Chief Executive Mike Porra took interest in the brand at about that time.
“Michael and I were at a company called Global Action Sports, and we were creating, producing and promoting a freestyle motocross show called the ‘Crusty Demons’ that was successful, in particular in Australia and New Zealand,” Edwards said. “We took it to Europe, and it was an uphill struggle because the brand just wasn’t known over there.”
But Nitro Circus was. They struck a deal with Godfrey Entertainment to buy licensing rights for live events, and Nitro Circus Live Tour was born.
“The show was hugely successful—it broke all box office records in its inaugural tour in Australia in 2010,” Edwards said.
In 2013 the Aussie and Utah entities merged as Nitro Circus and moved the company’s headquarters to OC. They also took a $25 million investment from The Raine Group, which provided an exit for the co-founders. Popular action-sports athlete Pastrana has no official title at Nitro Circus but is a major part of the competitors roster.
Raine increased its stake in the brand to an estimated $60 million, and over time become the majority owner. The New York-based private equity firm supported the idea of Nitro Circus transforming and responding to changes in the way viewers consume content.
“As the DVD market dwindled, from a profitability point of view, the tour was very much in the driver’s seat,” Edwards said, adding that its next step was “to build out this 360-degree company,” and go from “an office of 15 of us focused primarily on the tour” to building out a full media production facility, developing consumer products, setting up licensing, events and digital divisions and accompanying back office capabilities.
“The vision was to set ourselves up so that we could go after each of these different ways of exploiting the IP,” he said.
And it appears that the company is—expansion to the China and India markets is in the works; Walmart is selling Nitro Circus-branded bikes and helmets; Pastrana co-produced a sequel to his movie “Action Figures” for the Sony Crackle platform; and the company recently wrapped up a two-year deal with NBCUniversal’s NBCSN to air its Nitro World Games.
There’s also “a whole bunch of new events … on the creative drawing board,” including a permanent show in Las Vegas that Nitro Circus said it will formally announce soon.
“It’s going to be in a unique environment and one that we’re sure is going to completely shake up the live luxury market in Las Vegas,” Edwards said, adding that Pastrana is starring in an “Evil Live” stunt in Las Vegas to be broadcast on the History channel. He’ll attempt to jump over 52 motorcycles and 16 buses to break daredevil Evel Knievel’s record.
“Really, we’ve only just begun from a media point of view, the kind of range of content that we’re able to produce and the different means of distributing that.”
