5.5// Golden Trail’s Golden Content
A Trailmix of news, quotes and ramblings about trail media
Hey pals,
I received a lot of positive feedback after my interview with Zoe last week so I’ll try more interviews in the future to explore the behind the scenes of our burgeoning media landscape. I’m particularly interested in hearing about the trends in the advertising side of our sport, so if you know any marketing managers, send them my way!
This week is another Trailmix, a summary of the key updates in trail running media and the broader media landscape. Hope you enjoy :)
Matt
The Golden Trail Series are always up for trying innovative formats. After facing the perennial trail running issue of too little signal to livestream, Aravaipa and the Golden Trail crew live-streamed a post Pikes Peak talk show with the racers breaking down their race. The format was laid back, allowing the participants to open up, crack a few jokes and show their character. The GT team have a history of this now. Their post 2020 season documentary series on YouTube was a triumph that presented trail running as a professional sport whilst capturing the behind the scenes human drama. It was one of trail running’s first foray into entertainment and to this day it’s one of the best examples of content to come out of trail running (even though at times it felt a little bit too ‘Drive to Survive’ with the black background interview interludes). The future of this sport is anchored in turning participants into personalities. The investments GTS has made in media has demonstrated their commitment to developing the fandom around trail running, and the sport will be all the better for it.
-
The platforms at the foundation of the creator economy are struggling. Recently we’ve heard workers being laid off from Patreon, Meta’s Substack competitor ‘Bulletin’ being shut down and Substack cutting benefits for its creators. Financially, this is a tale of growing too quickly, companies operating on tight margins, a plethora of competition rising up to attract the small number of creators to their platform (expect consolidation) and an economy where people are struggling to pay their own bills let alone a creator’s. A more interesting discussion is are we as a society open to paying for content after decades of receiving content for free over the internet? My interview with Zoe last week suggests that trail runners are, but with many new creators and media brands adapting subscription models in the trail running space, the competition for wallet share will get feisty.
-
Search is actually getting interesting. How we search has changed and Google is trying to keep up. Google has always hinted that YouTube was slowly becoming a discovery engine for certain visual verticals (think food or sports), but since YT is Google’s property they didn’t make many significant updates. After the recent revelation that TikTok is stealing search share and Reddit has now become shorthand for ‘reviews’, Google has upped its game. First, we saw the new search updates that promoted original content ahead of click-bait or summary articles. Then last week we saw updates at their annual search event that covered visual searches, shopping updates and forum listings. All of this is to keep users on Google and brands focused on Google’s SEO updates, but the modern search experience has changed; we discover articles through Twitter, recipes through TikTok and products though Instagram. Entire media companies are built off optimising their content for discoverability on specific platforms, that’s why we have service content to serve Google searchers, so with changes to our search experience so too does the types of content brands build and business models they adopt.
-
With the introduction of Shorts monetization, YouTube is aiming to be THE online video platform for Shorts, long-form and livestreams. Publish Press (login-wall) summarised the distinction best ‘Shorts serve as the discovery mechanism, long-form drives views, and livestream builds community’. Trail running has traditionally focused on long form video content and recently livestreams, but most attempts at short-form videos have just been resized hype reels of races that don’t adopt the nuance of the format. TikTok’s creator fund was always going to be a winner takes all economy, providing little revenue to those out side the top 10%. Potentially with better incentives similar to the current YT monetisation model, we’ll see more innovation from trail running creators in short form.
