4.5// A New Format
A Trailmix of news, quotes and ramblings about trail media
Hey pals,
It’s 2023 brand planning season, and as anyone who works in marketing or media right now can attest, it’s pretty hectic. Hence why I’m pretty silent on Twitter and making a full blown research piece for you lovely readers is hard to fathom right now.
However, i thought this was a good opportunity to try a new format. A short mixture (a trail mix, if you will) of articles, quotes and thoughts on trail running media news to keep you abreast of the updates to the space. There doesn’t tend to be much ‘media news’ about trail running, so i’ll include relevant pieces on the broader media landscape too as what happens there will also impact trail media.
I’ll still aim to publish a trends piece every two weeks, but if this format works then I’ll publish this in the in-between weeks (in other words, you now get a newsletter every week, you lucky bunch).
Let me know what you think!
Matt
Recessionary fears will likely impact sponsorship growth over the next few quarters. Over on Digiday, Shira Atkins at Wonder Media Studio, a podcast network and production house, sounded the alarm that the podcast industry is facing headwinds going into 2023, stating that RFPs dried up over summer. This chimes with the general fog of uncertainty in the media industry around our economic climate and is impacting 2023 brand planning season.
As Jonathan of For the Long Run Podcast mentioned on Finn’s Singletrack podcast this week, there is a large potential for non-endemic brands to invest in trail running sponsorship, whether on a podcast or elsewhere. However these tests usually come out of ‘innovation’ budgets if they haven’t run with the media partner before, and it is such budgets that are typically the first to shrink in a recession. Whilst growth from non-endemic brands is slow I haven’t heard news about endemic ad budgets in the outdoor industry. If any media owners have seen changes, message me.
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When we talk about community in trail running, for me Reddit is the OG online trail and ultrarunning community. When learning about the training switch required for ultrarunning, Reddit taught me the minutiae of people’s experience with nutrition, courses and why potatoes can be lifesavers in the middle of a 100k.
Over on Twitter this week I posted about my experiment with using the poll function to learn more about the everyday trail runner’s experience of media, in this case whether they watched any livestreams this year. Out of 192, half said they had, with the other half claiming they either hadn’t or didn’t want to.
The Reddit audience is largely North American, so I’m taking these results to be representative of that population. However, since UTMB and Golden Trail are investing so much into livestreams to boost the media rights valuation of their tournaments, the US audience will be key to this expansion.
Of course, this method lacks the methodological rigour I would use in my day job, but small scale polls like this are a nice way to get the sentiment of the community as we move through this era of professionalisation.
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Subscription model’s are swiftly becoming running’s favourite flavour of business model. On Monday, Freetrail launched their 2nd chapter, introducing a new subscription, bringing Corine Malcolm on as editor in chief to add written content and sunsetting their app. This move marks Freetrail’s entrance to becoming a full blown digital media company with audio, video and written content, all largely funded by subscriptions (their model is a little more complex than that, but we’ll save that for another essay).
This comes weeks after nine running creators joined to form Relay, another digital media company that publishes written, audio and video content and is funded by, you guessed it, subscriptions. Whilst they follow the on-trend content-to-commerce business model, both companies have different value propositions for different audiences (broadly, Freetrail is for trail runners in search of a community and training plans, Relay is for all runners who want access to content from the top content creators in running).
Whilst subscriptions aren’t new in media, the playbook to driving them is born of a new generation of creators seeking to monetise their audiences. The creators who are the most adept at building valuable audiences will be the ones that succeed in this game. For running creators, building out a media operation behind them is simply the next evolution.
Of course, the obvious question is how many subscriptions in the running vertical is too many for each to sustainably grow. But we’ll deal with that once we see how these companies play out. Chapeau, the teams at Relay and Freetrail.
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On the shifting role of homepages:
If Twitter and Facebook were once the major threats to media, now it’s Discord chats and Subreddits, private places where people gather to both generate and consume their own content in hyperspecific niches…. So now your homepage has to be a clubhouse, too.
Kyle Chayka on The Verge’s updated homepage
