DirtonDirt.com exclusive
10th anniversary: From site's launch to 10 years
By Kevin Kovac
DirtonDirt.com senior writer
The genesis of this truly unique motorsports website can be traced back over a decade to when a college broadcasting student named Michael Rigsby and his journalistic hero, Todd Turner, started talking about how the Dirt Late Model division needed a full-fledged presence on the Internet. | 10th anniversary coverage
“As early as 2003 and 2004, when I was in my junior and senior year of college (at Illinois State University in Bloomington), Todd and I would email or chat once in awhile or see each other at the races and we’d constantly talk about how, as the Internet was continuing to grow, we thought that a true, digital site that covered Dirt Late Models could be just absolutely huge,” says Rigsby, who was a race-loving teenager when he struck up a friendship with Turner, a veteran, widely-traveled Dirt Late Model writer. “I want to say it was like late 2003 or early 2004, during my senior year, when we really had our first discussion about, ‘Well, what would it look like?’ There were times that we would talk on the phone and just obsess over websites, saying, ’Look at this, look at this,’ just noting things that we liked.”
“The biggest part of our conversations back then was, ‘Wow, this is terrible. There should be something online for Dirt Late Models,’” recalls Turner, who at the time was working as the editor of the bi-weekly short-track trade paper, National Dirt Digest. “I think we knew in our heart of hearts that (a Dirt Late Model news site) was going to work and it was the right thing to do. I guess a lot of the other stuff was just details, but we knew that if we kept plowing ahead it would work — in some form, of course, because we couldn’t have said then what it looks like today, but we knew an online component was out there and ready to be grabbed by somebody.”
The concept began to crystallize in 2006 when Rigsby and Turner had their most significant discussion yet about this unprecedented undertaking. By then Rigsby was an upstart sports anchor and reporter for WMTV, the NBC affiliate in Madison, Wis., and as he was preparing to leave on a getaway to Cancun with his girlfriend and future wife, Amber Vander Pluym, he had a veritable eureka moment on his phone with Turner.
“I vividly remember that I was getting ready to fly out on vacation with Amber and I was sitting in the Madison airport and I picked up the phone and called Todd,” Rigsby says. “It was actually a crossroads time for me because I had what amounted to a head hunter (agent) for me who was trying to get me an interview to progress my broadcasting career (with the Big 10 Network, a Milwaukee TV station and/or ESPN News) and I just had to make a decision. And I don’t know what it was, but I just didn’t want to stay in that form of broadcasting anymore. It just wasn’t something I wanted to do really, so I called Todd and I sat there for the full two hours I was waiting in that airport and we talked about everything (concerning a Dirt Late Model website).
“I would say that was the first time where I felt like, at that moment, ‘We’re gonna start exploring the hell out of what would make this work.’ ”
Less than a year later this dream even had a name.
“The actual original name that I wanted, and we wanted, was DirtLateModel.com, but it was already taken so we had to come up with something else,” Rigsby says. “I remember in early 2007 we were sitting at my sister’s house in Madison, while the (Chicago) Bears were in the NFC Championship game against the (New Orleans) Saints, and my stepdad was there and we literally had like a vision board going where we were just writing tons of stuff down, ideas for names. I was like, ‘It’s got to be something catchy, something with a hook, if I can’t get DirtLateModel.com.’
“It was actually my stepdad Jim who came up with the name. He just blurted out, ‘Well, how about ‘The Dirt on Dirt?’ It was almost like ‘The Facebook’ moment. I was like, ‘That’s good, but let’s drop the from it and make it just DirtonDirt.com.”
On Sept. 4, 2007 — after months of meticulous planning — DirtonDirt.com went live at the start of World 100 weekend at Eldora Speedway in Rossburg, Ohio, with Rigsby as CEO, Vander Pluym as his partner and promotions-marketing director and Turner as their first (and then only) employee serving as managing editor. A new age in Dirt Late Model media had arrived.
Prepping for launch
At the start, Rigsby had a fairly straightforward vision for what he wanted DirtonDirt.com to provide the Dirt Late Model world.
“It was always sort of centered around the World 100,” Rigsby says, referring to the division’s most prestigious event. “It was always like, ‘Well, imagine going to the World 100 and covering it this way, with a race-winner interview, reaction from the top-five drivers immediately after it was over, highlights as soon as the race was over, live updates throughout the weekend. The idea for the site was always centered around that — how we could cover the World 100.”
In more than a general sense, Rigsby wanted to create a one-stop, ESPN.com-like home for the niche Dirt Late Model community.
“We had an email exchange back in 2006 and Michael was already referring to it as the ‘ESPN.com of Dirt Late Model racing,’ ” Turner notes.
“The biggest thing is, I’m an enormous sports fan,” Rigsby says. “I’m not gonna pretend that all our ideas are original. Tons of our stuff comes from stuff I’ve seen in other sports mediums. And even if Todd isn’t as big a sports fan as I am, he’s just a consumer of all media, so he would see and know plenty of it to have an idea of what he thought it should look like just like I would.”
Before DirtonDirt.com could become a reality, however, Rigsby had to figure out all the details — and the money it would take to get it off the ground. Both Rigsby and Turner agreed that the site would need to be subscription-based to help provide the revenue necessary to keep it rolling once launched, but there were myriad other start-up costs associated with the venture that would require Rigsby obtaining a small-business loan. During the early months of 2007, itemizing all that was foremost on Rigsby’s mind.
“We had a full formal business plan that we took care of for our (business) loan application and we met with multiple web developers — all while we still had full-time jobs,” Rigsby recalls. “One of my buddies who worked with me (at WMTV)at the time, every day when we’d get off work we’d go to this restaurant, we’d lay out equipment and say, ‘Now, what equipment are we gonna need to do this?’ Then we’d realize that an X-amount of dollars business loan is not gonna be enough, so we had to figure all that out.”
There was also the matter of confirming the participation of Turner, whose journalistic and computer talents, not to mention his notoriety in the Dirt Late Model realm, Rigsby deemed vital for DirtonDirt.com. A meeting between Rigsby and Turner during a World of Outlaws Craftsman Late Model Series event on May 16, 2007, at Brownstown (Ind.) Speedway — and a follow-up confab the next day with Turner’s wife-to-be, Julie — virtually assured that Turner would sign on.
“When Todd and I talked at Brownstown’s World of Outlaws show, that was really the final, ‘Yes, we are doing this’ moment,” Rigsby recalls. “I met with him, and he was like, ‘All right, I’m all in … but you’ve got to come convince Julie.’ It was a Wednesday-night show and I had Wednesdays and Thursdays off work, so I wasn’t planning on staying overnight because I needed to get back up to Madison by Thursday to be ready for work on Friday. But Todd was like, ‘You gotta stay.’ So I stayed in Seymour (Ind.) on Wednesday night, drove down to (Turner’s hometown of) Louisville (Ky.) the next morning — which is south, the wrong way for heading back to Madison — to meet with Julie for breakfast. I convinced Julie that we were gonna do it, and then drove all the way back to Madison that night and went to work on Friday.”
“Me and Michael just both wanted to be good with (Julie) being on board with it,” says Turner, who married Julie one week after the 2007 World 100. “There was no real big concern on her part of it —and honestly, she probably doesn’t even really understand the ins and outs of it because she doesn’t go to the races — but we wanted her to feel comfortable with it because it was gonna be more travel for me for awhile and a little bit of a change in what we did.
“And to be honest, even though we were convinced it was going to be a success, by some measure it was a little bit of taking a chance. I was a little bit older (41 at the time) so I wanted to make sure professionally it was a good move and it also wasn’t that long before we got married, so Michael and I wanted to win her over that we really believed this was going to work.”
After Rigsby received word just before Memorial Day weekend in 2007 that his small-business loan had been approved, the ultimate green light for DirtonDirt.com flashed on. He left his broadcasting job in Madison the week after that June’s Dream at Eldora while almost simultaneously Turner informed National Dirt Digest that he would be departing at the end of August.
Vander Pluym, meanwhile, was working at the time as the marketing director and an on-air disc jockey at a Clear Channel radio station in Madison, Wis. She wasn’t planning to play an active role in DirtonDirt.com, but that soon changed.
“There was a time when we were launching DirtonDirt that Amber was not going to be part of it,” Rigsby says. “That lasted for about a month of me and Todd talking. During that time Amber and I were having discussions and she’s say, ‘Hey, how is this going to work? You’re gonna be on the road a ton.’ And then I started describing some things to her and said, ‘You know, we gotta figure out, are we gonna hand fliers out at the track? Are we gonna set up a booth at the tracks?’
“Then, we literally were sitting in our living room in Madison one day and it clicked with her. She’s like, ‘That’s exactly what I do now (marketing),’ and we looked at each other and were like, ‘OK.’ She was just like every young broadcasting kid — you’re making no money, working a million hours and you don’t like your job very much — so she was ready to do something different.”
The soon-to-be Mrs. Rigsby (the couple eventually wed May 1, 2009, in Las Vegas) was new to Dirt Late Model racing — her first race was the 2004 World 100 soon after she and Michael began dating while they attended Illinois State — but she was eager to learn about the sport.
“I literally knew nothing about Dirt Late Model racing when I met Michael,” Amber says. “I remember he would talk about it and he would bring it up, and then he had a conversation with Todd about (the DirtonDirt.com idea) and it started ramping up and he was really gung-ho about the idea. It was a plan between the two of them, and at that point I was not involved at all.
“But I hated my job, and I was like, ‘Would you guys need a promotions and marketing director?’ Michael was like, ‘Yeah, I think it would be helpful.’ I had some ideas for stuff, so I said, ‘What if I worked with you guys?’ ”
“I remember being nervous about calling Todd and explaining to him about Amber — like, is he gonna go for this? Like, my girlfriend working in this company?” Rigsby says. “I was nervous to tell him, ‘You know, I really think it’s a good idea if my girlfriend helps this company and comes on the road.’ He had met Amber and he liked her a lot, but still … When he was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds great,’ I was happy.
“Then she started calling hotels, she bought a (promotional) booth and said, ‘This is what it’s gonna a look like,’” he continues. “It was something we needed as a company.”
Turner relished having Amber join the team.
“I was probably glad that she was into it,” Turner says. “It wasn’t a problem at all. I mean, really, we were all getting to know each other at that time. Me and Michael knew each other as race fans more than anything then, so we were kind of thrown together and we had to get along and we had to learn to be with each other, and throwing Amber in there added another element. We had to make this work as people as well as a business, and we did.”
In the months leading up to DirtonDirt.com’s launch, Rigsby and Amber left Madison and moved in with Amber’s parents in O’Fallon, Mo., outside St. Louis, in an effort to cut costs while attempting to build the website.
“With the business loan and everything we had going into the business we had no money, so Amber’s dad (Joe), who was a huge supporter through all of this — the first subscriber, actually, with my dad (Barry) the second and John Turner (Todd’s father) the third — said, ‘Come live here as long as you need to get on your feet,’ ” Rigsby says. “I vividly remember driving the U-Haul truck by myself from Madison to O’Fallon (in the summer of ’07) and I had my laptop open in the passenger’s seat — which was a precursor of things to come — and I was literally looking constantly to see if I had a new email because the site was in development. Every half-hour I was hitting refresh to see what the site looked like with the latest update.”
Rigsby and Amber ultimately lived with Amber’s parents for just over a year — they relocated to Destin, Fla., in the fall of 2008 and stayed there for seven months before moving to Chicago for two years and and then finally setting up stakes in their own home in Bloomington, Ill., in 2011 — but it was an unforgettable stretch in their lives.
“It was really interesting,” Amber says with a smile. “As an office, Michael and I used my old bedroom growing up, so there was, like, my name in stickers on the door and a beaded curtain and a black light, and we used to have to keep a sign on the bedroom door that said, ‘On the phone’ and ‘Off the phone’ because my mom (Janice) would holler up at us and be like, ‘Amber, Michael … lunch is ready!’
“At the time, we were like, ‘Ugh, this isn’t the greatest situation,’ but especially since my dad has passed (Amber’s father died unexpectedly in April 2014 at the age of 62), I wouldn’t trade it for anything. And they were so important in helping us get this off the ground. It just would have never worked if we would not have been able to live there.”
The grind begins
On Sept. 4, 2007, Rigsby went in front of the camera — wearing a collared shirt that didn’t even sport a DirtonDirt.com logo and with Eldora Speedway in the background — and taped a video to welcome subscribers to DirtonDirt.com. It was the official start of his excellent adventure at the helm of Dirt Late Model racing’s new media source.
Were Rigsby and Turner ready? Well …
“It’s surreal, thinking back on it,” Rigsby says. “It’s funny, because at the time I was like, ‘Man, we’ve got a handle on this,’ but looking back on it, we probably had no idea what we were doing.
“We actually got to Eldora on Tuesday after Labor Day (Sept. 4) — the site went live that Tuesday morning, and we drove to Eldora that night. I started covering stuff that day — the campgrounds, that first (video) interview with Jimmy Dehm in the parking lot. It just felt surreal in a way that we were actually doing it, and it almost felt like, ‘Well, I wonder if I’m going to have to go back to my broadcasting job like on Monday? You know what I mean?
“The one thing was that we had pretty instantaneous updates on subscribers, so I did know that, OK, there are people joining the site. There was a little bit of buzz about it on 4m the message board, so I think, at the time, that was all I needed to convince myself that it was good enough, if that makes sense. It was like, ‘Well, there’s people joining, people are watching this stuff because I can track the view numbers, so this must be worth it.’
“And by Saturday,” he adds, “after Todd had been doing those live (blog-style) updates from Thursday’s tech day and Friday’s qualifying, I remember getting emails in the morning from people saying, ‘Wow, this is really neat. Your guys’ stuff is like instantaneous.’ So we knew people were reading, too.”
It didn’t take long for Rigsby, then an energetic, Dirt Late Model-loving 25-year-old, to become intoxicated by this brave new reporting world he had entered at Eldora. Not only was he his own boss, but with the Internet there was no time or space limitations on coverage like on television, radio or print publications.
“The biggest thing to me is, imagine starting a media company,” Rigsby says. “When I worked in television I had a three-minute sportscast each night. It’s very easy, in retrospect, to plot a three-minute sportscast. When you start your own media company on the internet, there are no restrictions on what you can — literally, anything and everything goes. With my raging anxieties, it was very overwhelming for me in the beginning. I mean, here I am at Eldora, a 25-year-old kid with a camera … what do you have to cover? Literally anything and everything. I could never shoot enough. I could never do enough. I could never have enough.
“In the beginning, Todd and I both felt the same way. We were in charge of everything. We didn’t have any editors to tell us what to cover. It was all us, and that was overwhelming. That first year I stayed at Eldora all night the first night — I literally never went back to the hotel. I stayed there all night, shot that piece with that guy parking cars at 3 in the morning. Amber finally came out to the track at like 9 a.m. the next morning and she said, ‘You’ve been here all night!’ It just never felt like there was enough. I could always get more.
“I remember Jimmy Owens came to me at the World 100 that year and said, ‘I like the website, but it seems like everything could be longer,’ ” he adds. “Then it dawned on me that I don’t have my news director saying, ‘What are you doing? This needs to be shorter.’ I could just let it rip. But in a way, that was good and bad.”
Indeed, there were only so many hours in a day for a one-man video editing department to create content and still grab at least a modicum of sleep. At the start, Rigsby did television-style highlight packages with voiceovers at every event he covered, but that was a postrace pace one person could not keep up for the long haul. Doing that night-after-night during the first DoD-covered Georgia-Florida Speedweeks in 2008 wore him down, so, when Rigsby and Turner embarked later that year on covering the entire month-long UMP DIRTcar Summernationals for the first time, Rigsby knew he had to switch the postrace format to announcer-covered race highlights and recaps featuring one-on-one interviews with drivers in order to streamline the editing process. It’s a style that continues with DoD’s race coverage to this day.
“I had it in my head that everything I was doing in TV I had to bring over (to DoD),” Rigsby says. “I thought, I’ve got to kind of wow ‘em, so my intention at the beginning was to never have an announcer on DirtonDirt ever. I would take the highlights, edit them and voice a recap to every single package.
“But I realized that wasn’t it … that it’s more important to be timely and accurate than trying to do these TV-style packages I was doing, basically because two things happened. One, I realized people actually like hearing the (track) announcer (with the highlights). And two, I realized I’ll be dead. I will never be able to sleep any night if I kept doing it the way I was doing it. It will be impossible for me to sustain this pace.
“Honestly, Speedweeks about killed me, but during the Summernationals I was like, ‘OK, this can’t go on.’ I can’t sustain this.”
Amber certainly agreed.
“I would say to him, ‘You just can’t keep going like this forever,’” says Amber, who traveled to every Summernationals event in 2008 with Michael and Turner to staff DoD’s promotional booth. “We felt like we were young when we started it so we could keep this for a little while, but I would be like, ‘There is no way you can keep this up.’”
Turner had the same feeling from his first-hand experience handling the copy side of the website. He was swamped by the sheer volume of information — results, news, photos — that needed to be processed and posted on the site alongside his own original material.
“I remember specifically probably the first Show-Me 100 (in 2008 at Missouri’s West Plains Motor Speedway),” Turner says. “The preliminary night was great, and I remember going back to the hotel and, of course, Memorial Day weekend is jam-packed with races, so I literally stayed up all night until the sun came up working on the other (results) stuff and still had to write my own (Show-Me 100) coverage to do. I said, ‘I can’t do this. I have to go back to the track tonight … and there’s gonna be a whole other night of races tonight, too.’
“It was one of those moments where you realized you couldn’t do everything like we do now with the volume of staff we have. Social media (developments) really drove the speeds (of news posting on the site) up even faster, but still, you just had to do the best you could, from the top down, and go with your best stuff first. I just couldn’t do it all at once.”
Somehow, Rigsby and Turner made it through three full years of solo video and copy/photo editing. They’re not quite sure how they physically survived each season’s grueling Summernationals, let alone the remainder of the ceaseless Dirt Late Model schedule.
“It really is a fog,” Turner says. “I do remember one night leaving either Peoria or Spoon River (during the Summernationals) and I was at the hotel and I was just exhausted. I was spent. I felt like those crew guys must feel on that deal. I’d just been going on fumes. I made it to that night, we got a rainout and I remember thinking, Oh, I’ve got to do these things, but I just fell asleep. It was just too much.”
Rigsby finally added a full-time staffer to DoD’s original trio in November 2010 when he hired Joshua Joiner to assist Turner with writing and editing copy.
“When I looked at our timeline and saw we didn’t hire a full-timer until November of 2010, I was like, ‘We went three years with only three of us?’” Rigsby says with a laugh. “I can’t fathom that we went that long with just the three of us. We just did some crazy stuff, put in some crazy hours, because you don’t know any different. You think you don’t have anything left in the tank and you just keep going and going and going because that’s what you have to do.”
For Rigsby’s video department, salvation came in the form of an Illinois State student he brought in as an intern during the summer of 2010. Derek Kessinger — a huge Dirt Late Model fan who grew up at Fairbury (Ill.) American Legion Speedway — quickly proved to be an adept videographer and editor capable of taking an immense workload off Rigsby’s shoulders, leading to his full-time hiring in May 2011.
“I hate to give him too much credit, but Derek literally changed everything,” Rigsby says with a laugh. “When we hired Derek and I took him to the Summernationals for the first time with me, I remember sitting in Ryan Unzicker’s hauler at Spoon River after I shot and voiced the (Summernationals) Minute and Derek was like, ‘Well, can I try to edit this?’ I was like, ‘Well, yeah,’ but I was thinking he’d never be able to do it. Then he did it … he just whipped right through the entire Summernationals Minute, and I remember walking out of the back of Ryan Unzicker’s trailer and being like, ‘Oh my god, someone just did something for me. This is the first time that happened, where someone actually worked for me.’
“Derek changed the trajectory of the company forever, he really did. Having someone come on who could shoot races and edit made me realize that DirtonDirt is better when I’m not doing every single thing. Derek likes to tell me all the time that he saved my career,
“DirtonDirt is such a business now, and I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he adds. “It’s turned into such a cottage industry that I have to work on that. I can’t worry about a (video) white-balance at Lincoln at a Summernationals race. That’s what we have Derek and everybody else for — and that’s why DirtonDirt has become what it has.”
An amazing decade
Today DirtonDirt.com stands as the media entity of record for Dirt Late Model racing. The company that began with Michael, Amber and Todd now includes more than a dozen full-time staffers and many more contributors, allowing DoD to provide subscribers video from multiple events across the country on a single night — the days of Rigsby picking one race to cover are long gone — exclusive stories, timely results and an array of special features like the Late Model Live studio show. There’s also a season-long schedule of live pay-per-view race coverage produced by the DirtonDirt.com crew in partnership with tracks and series (a total of 50 dates were on the slate in 2017), adding another revenue stream to keep DoD purring into the future.
Did any of DoD’s founding three envision such a meteoric rise for the company over the course of a decade?
“Never, never,” Rigsby, now 35, says, shaking his head in amazement. “Never in a million years did I think we could get to this point. My biggest thing I thought could happen is I could have one full-time video person and Todd would have one full-time writer, and that’s it.”
“I would never have believed we would have the staff we have now,” Turner, 51, offers. “As far as the physical part of it, that’s probably the most stunning to me.”
“If you would have said to me 10 years ago how big this company would be today, I would’ve been shocked,” Amber, 36, adds. “I feel like, at the time, you don’t really think about the future. Michael may have felt differently because his brain works in a different way than mine — he thinks ahead way more than I do — so to me, it was like, ‘OK, let’s give this a try, and if it works, great.’ It never really occurred to me what this was going to look like in 10 years, that you’re gonna have this staff and this great team of people. I never would have thought that.”
As DoD celebrates its 10th anniversary, how far the company has come since its birth naturally invites a nostalgic look back from its principles. The current success, of course, was made possible by all those highway miles logged by Michael, Amber and Todd in the formative years, all those late nights (or, more precisely, early mornings) Rigsby and Turner turned in, all the sacrifices they made to focus on building a respected website.
And the constant battle with the Internet that Rigsby and Turner fought (and, in many ways, continue to fight). For a website that provides timely news and videos, the Internet is its lifeblood.
“Amber said, ‘I feel like your life for 10 years has been you versus the Internet,’” Rigsby says. “All of us who work at DirtonDirt understand that at some level.
“I remember the first time I held an LTE (cellular) card in my hand. We were at Wilmot (Wis.) for a Summernationals race and I hit upload for the Summernationals Minute (video) and I, like, had to double-take. I looked down at the screen and I was like, ‘It’s going so fast!’ We figured it out once that, when (higher-speed) LTE (coverage) came around, it saved me 30 minutes per night uploading the Minute during the Summernationals … so take that times 30 nights, and that’s 900 minutes. Think about how much time that is spent uploading!”
“In all honesty, I didn’t think about the Internet that much (before DirtonDirt.com),” Turner says. “But when you were so reliant on it like we were, then you realized every minute where you were, and then you realized how remote some of these tracks were and that that was gonna be an issue for us.
“I remember at Spoon River (during a Summernationals event), me and Michael and Amber were standing around there and I’m holding my laptop probably for an hour-and-a-half loading up the Minute. It’s all of 75 seconds of video, but it was almost to the feature until we got it uploaded. We could’ve driven to Peoria and back. And during the Hillbilly 100 (at Internet-scarce Tyler County Speedway in Middlebourne, W.Va.) one time, I drove back to some little town and drove through a neighborhood until I found an open (home) network and then I parked in front of their house and updated the site for 10 minutes or so and then drove back to the track.
“It’s a dream now compared to what it used to be,” he adds. “You just fought that battle forever.”
In a sense, the frustrating, sometimes comical pursuit of a cellular signal to update the website adds a little extra romance to those halcyon days when everything was new and exciting and happening so fast for Michael, Amber and Todd.
“It was all a whirlwind, but it was also some of the funnest times we had,” Turner says of DoD’s early years. “I guess that’s how it is when you’re on a journey like this. The stuff that’s hardest, when you look back, it’s sort of the glory days of it, too. I guess I’m proudest of that stuff as anything, to think we were able to do that and it helped build the foundation for what this is now.”
“It just was nonstop,” Amber adds. “Our whole lives were DirtonDirt. It’s one of those things where we look back on it now and we’re like, ‘Oh my god, we were crazy!’ I’m too old for that now, but you just did what you had to do.
“We were always running around. At the time, you’re thinking, This feels crazy, this feels hectic, but now, looking back on it, oh, I miss those days of me, Michael and Todd traveling everywhere together.”
Amber points out, however, that, even with a bigger staff, DirtonDirt.com remains a lifestyle as much as a job for everybody on the payroll. The Dirt Late Model carousel simply never stops spinning.
“I think it’s something that most people who don’t work for us or work with us, people outside of the company, don’t quite understand,” Amber says. “It took a while for even our family and friends to understand how it works for us. This is a 24-hour baby. We cannot leave this and just come back to it when we want. There’s no clocking in at 9 a.m. and checking out at 5 p.m. It’s different hours, whenever things come and whenever things go, and it’s a lot of late nights and into the mornings, so it’s a very odd schedule … but it is your own.”
Explaining this business that’s part of a niche industry to outsiders can be difficult. Amber knows that first hand.
“I remember being in Madison and telling our friends that we were gonna do this and my girlfriend was like, ‘You’re gonna do what?’” Amber relates. “I would say that all of our friends were like, ‘You guys are absolutely crazy.’ I’m still convinced that my mom thinks that it’s motorcycles.
“But it never really occurred to me that, ‘Hey, this is absolutely bonkers to try’ — until people would actually say that to us,” she continues. “I guess in the beginning we were so young and we just had nothing to lose at the time, and I hated my job and he didn’t love his so we were just ready for something different and we were both kind of like, ‘Why not? Let’s just do this. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, then hey, we tried, and we’ll go back to radio or TV like we were doing.’”
It has worked. Yes, it has worked well.
Turner can succinctly sum up just ingrained in the Dirt Late Model landscape DirtonDirt.com has become.
“Just the presence and branding that DirtonDirt (now) has is amazing to me,” Turner says. “I remember the first couple years we were constantly explaining to people we’d interview, ‘I’m from DirtonDirt.com, it’s online, it’s kind of the ESPN for dirt racing.’ We had all these catch phrases we used because we were basically trying to teach people what it was since we’d run into people who had no idea.
“Now we’ve come so far where people will see my DirtonDirt shirt somewhere and they don’t know me but they can tell I’m a staff member because I have a notepad or because I have a bag and my shirt, and they’re like, ‘Oh, DirtonDirt.’ It’s amazing.
“I’m not trying to pat ourselves on the back or be cocky about it,” he adds, “but the literal branding that’s happened over a period of 10 years, where DirtonDirt become a thing of the sport that people everywhere know … that’s gratifying to know that. To me, it’s just a product of all the hard work of all the staffers and contributors and all the subscribers and advertisers who believed in us over the years.”
