6.5// The Merits and Pitfalls of Platforms

A Trailmix of news, quotes and ramblings about trail media

Hey pals,

A longer Trailmix today (dw, it’s only 5 mins), so I’ll keep this short.

This week’s Trailmix is ultimately about platforms and how they govern the discovery and distribution of news about our industry. Increasingly they play a greater part in how our community grows and communicates, so keeping up with news about their developments is key.

Have we become too dependent on them for our industry’s survival? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

Hope you enjoy :)

Matt

We all work our way into the online trail running community in different ways. I went through endless google searching to eventually find Reddit and from there discovered our plethora of podcasts. This was very obviously driven by me and my tendency to go down internet rabbit holes, but the discovery of our community is actually quite hard.

Google will always surface institutions like Trail Runner and IRunFar, because they build themselves around the platform, but the discovery mechanisms for podcasts is poor.

Discovery should come from native Podcast platforms, but neither Apple, Spotify nor YouTube have cracked it. Podcasters have always struggled with the distribution and growth of their podcast, often leaning on social media and partnerships to promote their efforts.

The knock on effect of this difficult listenership growth is on the ability for podcasters to grow the revenue of their podcasts, and ultimately make their podcast worth their time. Recently Spotify and Apple have released subscription offerings to offer an alternative revenue stream and discovery mechanism for podcasters, but the complexity of setting this up on either platform is a logistical nightmare and the recent cuts in Gimlet reveal the issue of making your podcast exclusive to one platform. As a podcast heavy industry, the discovery of our rich ecosystem of creators is dependent on these platforms to surface trail running podcasts without the user having to search for them.

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Whilst the US won the World Backyard Team Championships and Merijin Geerts and Ivo Steyaert displayed Herculean levels of endurance to complete 101 yards, the real winner was our sport’s beloved 63 year old backyard commentator Keith Dunn.

In between retweets about cats and trains, Keith, a backyard competitor himself, brought us continuous coverage of the entire event on Twitter.

I’m often against the voices in our sport who dogmatically hold on to its history of amateurish coverage, but it was humbling to see the amount of attention that Keith attracted across the week, with many chiming in with their own analysis of the data that Keith had diligently compiled.

In a way, the medium of singular tweets felt more appropriate to the coverage of backyard ultras like this. Very little happens over the course of a few hours and the performance is not exactly visually compelling enough to want to follow the livestreams across each country (I can’t imagine any hype reels with a punchy bass line will be created about this event).

When set against a backdrop of a sports media environment trending towards short form videos and ever larger media rights deals, Keith reminded us that sometimes the simple tweet can be enough to capture the attention of thousands.

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How we consume news and use social media has changed, so Meta is changing its publisher strategy. Last week, Meta announced an end to instant articles, which granted publishers quicker load time in-app in return for greater revenue share. Earlier this year Meta also stopped paying US publishers for allowing Facebook to promote their articles in the news feed.

Altogether this has been greeted with a communal shrug by publishers after the company continues its slow slither out of news distribution. However, Facebook is still the most used social media site for news, but how we consume news has become more visual with TikTok becoming the fastest growing source of news across most demographics. Unsurprisingly this is part of the motivation driving Facebook’s (and most other social platform’s) ‘pivot-to-video’ prompting publishers to increase their video output to maintain attention.

Traditional trail running media has not exactly followed this shift. IRunFar publishes pre and post race interviews, but thats about as far as it gets. Trail Runner doesn’t have a video division and is limited to whatever Outside wants to publish for it, which at the moment is minimal (at least it’s more than their UK compatriots who don’t have any).

This is where more modern media businesses like Freetrail have an advantage through publishing in text, audio and video, increasing the surface area of discovery and engagement. Maintaining such an output is a significant editorial and financial challenge and relies on 3rd party platforms for distribution and monetisation, but with news and content consumption becoming more platform based, media businesses that are more flexible to the whims of these platforms have an easier path to growth.