Yup - Carl did an excellent survey which returned surprising results - and its always been like this.
I first had my eyes opened in 2005, when Runner's World (then in a very dominant position) came into La Sportiva where I worked with their Media Kit. "Average Income" of their subscribers was $112,000! What? Time to switch gears - we're not talking to dirtbags. Ironically, it was hard to re-message all the ads and copy, because it was us in the industry who were the real dirtbags; our customers were better paid and better educated than we were 🤪
In 2014 when I cranked up Ultimate Direction, I immediately sent out a survey to our customers to learn about them. Same: the highest percentage income group was $100-150,000 (19.6%), 45.31% had an Associate or Bachelor degree and 31.64% a Graduate degree.
The recent ATRA Survey showed more respondents over the age of 60 (27%) than under the age of 40 (only 13%). Yikes. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Karl Meltzer (the winningest 100 mile runner ever, by far) told me his favorite sport was golfing.
It's important to note the above three survey examples are of proprietary customers rather than any attempt to reach the overall trail running demographic, so Carl's survey, even with its self-selected participation, is the best ever done.
But they all show the same thing: Runners are not dummies.
And I'll take a leap onto another limb: We often wonder why MUT media has such numerically low penetration into the massive overall running market ... is it because the content is dumb? (Whoa, did I actually say that?) When the majority of podcasts are endless conversations with someone who jogged a really long time faster than 200 other people who jogged a really long time, is an engineer, scientist, lawyer, or business owner going to be able to listen to that? Running media sometimes seems like a fanzine put out by high school students when the surveys indicate the larger market more closely resembles their teachers and parents.
Yup - Carl did an excellent survey which returned surprising results - and its always been like this.
I first had my eyes opened in 2005, when Runner's World (then in a very dominant position) came into La Sportiva where I worked with their Media Kit. "Average Income" of their subscribers was $112,000! What? Time to switch gears - we're not talking to dirtbags. Ironically, it was hard to re-message all the ads and copy, because it was us in the industry who were the real dirtbags; our customers were better paid and better educated than we were 🤪
In 2014 when I cranked up Ultimate Direction, I immediately sent out a survey to our customers to learn about them. Same: the highest percentage income group was $100-150,000 (19.6%), 45.31% had an Associate or Bachelor degree and 31.64% a Graduate degree.
The recent ATRA Survey showed more respondents over the age of 60 (27%) than under the age of 40 (only 13%). Yikes. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when Karl Meltzer (the winningest 100 mile runner ever, by far) told me his favorite sport was golfing.
It's important to note the above three survey examples are of proprietary customers rather than any attempt to reach the overall trail running demographic, so Carl's survey, even with its self-selected participation, is the best ever done.
But they all show the same thing: Runners are not dummies.
And I'll take a leap onto another limb: We often wonder why MUT media has such numerically low penetration into the massive overall running market ... is it because the content is dumb? (Whoa, did I actually say that?) When the majority of podcasts are endless conversations with someone who jogged a really long time faster than 200 other people who jogged a really long time, is an engineer, scientist, lawyer, or business owner going to be able to listen to that? Running media sometimes seems like a fanzine put out by high school students when the surveys indicate the larger market more closely resembles their teachers and parents.