By Mathias Eichler
Sponsor:
The Trail Running Film Festival presented by Brooks -
Back on Tour for 2025.
The Trail Running Film Festival presented by Brooks -
Back on Tour for 2025.
I’m throwing in a late addition to my ‘Predictions for 2025‘ post. And this is more of an open question than a straight prediction. Here it goes: Trail running and especially trail media will have to redefine itself in our post-social -media-age. But what will that look like?
Trail running, trail media, but even further the entire world of influencer culture, and with it the elite athletes have grown alongside social media over the course of the last few years. Media personalities have created entire followings, communities, and business models on these social media platforms. Elite athletes have contract stipulations that require a social media presences with strong engagement. Brands favor athletes with big followings on these platforms and the engagement metrics almost are more important than the athletes actual athletic performances. And while the latest wave of trail running growth was a bit behind the early days of social media when Twitter reigned, the visually captivating images lend themselves perfectly for Instagram. How many athletes became stars because of these tools? Now I am always someone who’s quick to jump on the ‘worry train’ and call for the end of something, but I see a trend where folks are increasingly fed up with the rulers of these platforms and the perceived dominance and lock in seems to be crumbling. The algorithms that were initially designed to create stickiness increasingly serve so many ads, and so few of the accounts one actually wants to see in their feed that dropping a platform from ones daily habit of media diet is becoming an easier and easier decision.
I’ve already noticed many race organizations who’ve build entire marketing strategies around “just posting their event announcements to Facebook” had to adjust and rebuild their social graph on Instagram. Now, over the course of the past few months a multitude of voices have opened Substack accounts and have abandoned posting on Instagram. For the end user, the casual trail runner, this what it is. Folks will adjust their media habits, build new routines and find their accounts and people who they want to follow. But for entrepreneurs, media startups, race organizations, and elite athletes with contracts this can be a tricky situation. Where do you put your effort in order to engage with the following you’re trying to market and sell to?
Social media killed, or almost killed, the open web. It used to be easy to find and follow blogs but almost everyone was lured to the social media silos, the dopamine hit of quick engagement, and the simplicity of the account setup and the posting tools. But this trend is reversing. Facebook is completely unusable these days. It used to be the gold standard in effectiveness for promoting local events. Instagram, another Zuckerberg Meta product increasingly becomes useless due to the algorithms scrambling the timeline. No one thought that the “global market square of ideas and conversations” Twitter would ever become irrelevant, and yet unless you’re interested in what Elon has to say it pretty much isn’t worth anyone’s time. How long until this happens to Instagram? For the past couple of years creators on YouTube have been loudly complaining that Google’s various changes are screwing with their ability to generate ad revenue on that platform. The trolls in the comments have made the community aspect of Youtube largely unusable. UTMB already pulled the livestreams for their World Series Finals in 2024 off the platform and onto their own website. If YouTube follows the latest content moderation policies that Meta just announced this week, where will the live-streaming of Western States and other races go?
There was this brief moment where we followed a bunch of likeminded folks who told us about local events which we signed up for and where we entertained ourselves by watching clips and photos of our heroes who inspired us to go out and do cool shit – the simplicity of it all – this is over.
Of course there will be new apps, new platforms, new tools for folks to gather, engage, share and communicate, but the gold rush is over. Silicon Valley and its creations are increasingly seen as questionable contributions to the global good and not the harbinger of the next great paradise where milk and honey flows out of bits and bytes.
Disruption is good I am told, but we usually like to be at the wheel and be the folks who are the disrupters. Being disrupted by outside forces ain’t so great. It might still be an opportunity in the end, and here, in the land of opportunity, we will do our darnedest to spin every day’s events as an opportunity, but it will come at a cost. A cost to rebuild, reset, and redefine our connections.
This year we’ve already seen more than the usual amount of noise during silly season when athletes re-sign their contracts and brands reshuffle their rosters. Of course is also due to other factors as outdoor companies are struggling to adjust their businesses post-pandemic. But their easy marketing strategies are also being disrupted by the very platforms they use to share their product announcements.
I mentioned above that this is not a prediction for the year, but rather a question. A question of where we’ll go from here. I have no answers. I just have a feeling, based on having been a user of the internet for almost 30 years, but it’s too early to make predictions. So I’ll leave it as a question:
How will trail running change in a post social media world?*
* And yes, thank you for bringing this up, of course, trail running won’t change. The pure and simple activity of putting on a pair of shoes and finding some peace and adventure on a trail in the outdoors will not change.
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