Conglomerate takeovers. Unwavering adherence to SEO strategies. And the ascendence of affiliate-link revenue models. A new ambiguity between written content and advertising has come to pass in much of the outdoor world, creating a fraught future for independent long form
While this statement may surprise no one, the fact remains that the outdoor industry has become laden with big business financing and big business ethos. Heavily funded, board-run, shareholder-conscience conglomerates now control a large amount of retail revenue and content creation in the outdoor industry. Quietly quenching our thirst for gear and the written word, these firms have brought an unprecedented consolidation to the outdoor industry – and with that an unparalleled power dynamic has resulted. As never before in the outdoor world, manufacturers and retailers are inextricably linked to sources of written content, bound together by the massive money machine that underlies the industry.
Magazines and blogs that once created income from subscription dollars and advertising now often rely on monetizing gear content. Equity backed firms have purchased legacy outdoor publications and morphed them into revenue models based on affiliate-link click through and data collection. Where subscriber dollars once drove the direction of these entities now exists a model based on heavy traffic and commissions.
We have arrived at a fraught junction in the history of outdoor written content. Much of what was the eyes and ears of the outdoor world are now controlled and operated by owners with a decidedly retail-leaning business model; the once-independent entities that were created to explore the depth of the outdoor experience now act on behalf of conglomerates whose main goal is to scale on behalf investors.
How did we get here? How has the outdoor culture, long a bastion of irreverent independence populated by free-thinking bums, come to find its written content anchored to sales and retail? The massive purchasing power of outdoor consumers has brought big business into the fold. But the ascendency of the internet as the center of modern commerce - and the nature of how we search for gear – has been the true cause of outdoor media’s fate.
This is the story of how search engine optimization has turned the outdoor culture’s content into a sales force for big business.
Part I – The Birth of the Outdoor SEO Machine
The outdoor world of the mid-nineties can seem to inhabit a sort of rosy, Edenesque place in the psyche. Mountain towns now grappling with AirBnb saturated neighborhoods and maxed-out infrastructure were then dotted with meadows of golden long grass. Mellow downtowns struggled to stay busy during the off season. And ski towns were decades away from the COVID rush and subsequent crunch of unaffordability and crowds. Many outdoor pursuits were firmly in their halcyon days; mostly undiscovered by the masses, taking place on basic gear, far from urban centers and most people’s minds.
The culture’s arc was then followed by a cadre of print entities, many independently owned – Couloir Magazine, founded in 1988 by Craig Dostie as a Sierra Club-affiliated, ski touring newsletter, found its footing by the mid-nineties as a nationally distributed, core publication of the nascent backcountry skiing movement. Other periodicals, like legacy titles Powder, Surfer, and newcomer Backcountry charted the zeitgeist of the outdoor lifestyle. But no magazine stood on more elevated footing than the seminal Outside Magazine, then long owned by Larry Burke. The magazine was the chief recorder of the outdoor culture, enjoying wide distribution, and was laden with feature pieces that spoke to a generation of enthusiasts. Jon Krakauer’s pivotal article-turned best-selling outdoor adventure books Into Thin Air and Into the Wild were birthed from pieces originally run in Outside.
The long-established model of magazine revenue – subscription dollars bolstered by paid advertising – remained the norm and continued to enjoy success in this period. Robust readership before and during the decade led to huge growth in the magazine sector, as well as a continued increase in selection. The success of the industry led to “specialization caus[ing] the number of periodicals published in the United States to jump from 6,960 in 1970 to more than 11,000 in 1994. More than 50 of these magazines had circulations of more than a million in 1994.”
Outdoor magazines enjoyed similar fortunes in the early parts of the decade. This success would be reinforced as the industry for outdoor gear enjoyed accelerated growth during the nineties – something that would have drastic impacts on the role of outdoor written content. Accounting for traditional sports as well as what is now defined as ‘the outdoor industry’, the recreation outdoor market accounted for some $48 billion in wholesale value in 1993, compared to nearly $70 billion by 2003. Moreover, population boomed in areas where outdoor activities reign; Colorado grew from 4.3 million inhabitants in 1990 to 5 million by 2000, a 30% increase; a pattern that repeated itself the West over. The forces of demographics and commerce were beginning to align, fating the outdoor industry's path to one of enormity.
With this rise in revenues came a consumerist bent to the outdoor magazines. Listicles and gear guides became more of a focus as the industry ballooned; advertisers became more influential as their gear evolved and revenues grew. And ads sold to firms with increased marketing budgets padded the bottom lines of magazines; the growth pattern became the lifeblood of manufacturers and publications alike. By 1996, Outside began running a full-issue summer buyers guide, adding a winter edition in 2007.
This time also marked the foundation of the modern World Wide Web, then a fledgling technology; a time when Netscape was a dominant browser, and dial-up load times measured in minutes, not milliseconds. Yahoo!, one of the first internet search engines, was founded in January of 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo while graduate students at Stanford. Yahoo Search – a preeminent apparatus of the early internet – came to life in 1995, beginning not as an optimized search engine but as “a web directory, manually curated and categorized by humans.” Moreover, “Yahoo was the first site to add news, sports, and finance feeds to its web directory,” a revolutionary early step in the internet’s ascent over physical content.
Just over four years later, another duo of Stanford students would establish a search engine – this one more innovative by an order of magnitude; one that would thrust the media landscape – and our culture at large – into uncharted territory.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s Google has arguably been as disruptive to modern culture as the internet itself. Early, human-powered search engines had little way of utilizing technology to comb the internet for content. Instead of being the powerful, algorithm-based sentinels roaming the web that we know today, Yahoo! and others were essentially online phonebooks, acting as unranked lists. Moreover, monetization of the internet and its search process was nebulous – highly valued firms in the dot com golden age often struggled to monetize, with the bubble bursting as speculative funding dried up in the early 2000s. Google would buck that trend and change internet business forever.
As Gil Pess wrote in Forbes in 2016, “Google’s founders were the first to…build their information retrieval business on tracking closely cross-references (i.e., links between pages) as they were happening and correlate relevance with quantity of cross-references (i.e., popularity of pages as judged by how many other pages linked to them). This was what set Google apart from its competitors, including Yahoo.”
Search engine optimization – how close to the top of the list your site lands on an internet search –thus became the supreme concern of all of ecommerce.
Google’s ascendancy was built on a stronger search engine – one that found connections not immediately obvious across gigantic swaths of the internet. Its ability to do that elevated searching the web; instead of scouring categorized lists, Google dissected the myriad relationships inherent in such a huge data set. The implications for such a powerful search engine became all the more tantalizing as companies previously bound to the localized brick-and-mortar model rapidly turned to the internet for commerce at the turn of the century. Optimizing how easily a business could be found on the web became paramount, a world-wide struggle for economic viability in an unfathomably large marketplace.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – how close to the top of the list your site lands on an internet search – thus became the supreme concern of all of ecommerce. And as the most popular search engine, Google became the driving force in SEO. Nearly 93% of all internet searches now take place through Google – giving the site an outsized importance in the struggle for eyes on the World Wide Web. Much of the business world is thus beholden to the Google search algorithm, essentially the determining factor for what sites are seen in an internet search.
What does this mean for the outdoor industry? Ecommerce, especially the utilization of search results via Google, has become an ultimate force in driving sales for the industry. The role of SEO has grown exponentially since the nineties as the outdoor business model has moved from a brick-and-mortal model to one increasingly dependent on online sales and its powerful marketing potential. And the paradigm-shifted, post-pandemic world is increasingly one focused on ecommerce. More outdoor-leaning companies emphasize online sales – often heavily toward a direct-to-consumer model. And with that shift comes a focus on driving online traffic.
What’s come to pass is the ascent of the SEO machine in the outdoor industry. No company can afford to be without a robust internet marketing strategy in this digitized marketplace, made more important after COVID drove the masses both outdoors and in front of their computers.
Part II - The New World Order in Outdoor Content
The outdoor gear manufacturers are in business to supply our demand for new gear and they go to great lengths to position our internet searches toward their products. But the SEO-dominated mindset isn’t solely utilized by the gear companies – the creators of outdoor written content also want to be found, want you to see their advertiser’s collateral, and often need you to click through their affiliate links to earn commissions. The monetization of online content has become the singular struggle that online publications undertake as social media and other modern forms of electronic marketing have led to the demise of legacy print models, . With strong competition from free content on Facebook and Instagram, online prose battles for revenue; it fights for eyes in a click-bait laden world.
Speaking to Jason Albert on The High Route Podcast regarding his subscriber-based cycling blog, Escape Collective, co-founder Caley Fretz ruminated on the path outdoor media has taken in his two decades in the industry as digital content and search engine optimization has predominated. As the internet upended media in the 2010s, outdoor content creators were suddenly tasked with evolving. “The way that money came into media was shifting underneath everybody,” said Fretz. “Nobody could really figure out how to make any money anymore. Do we go for a volume play… do we need to go deeper?”
As revenue streams became unclear the importance of SEO through Facebook and Google became paramount as page views became an important asset. “Suddenly these algorithms were the best way to get your content in front of people, and we ended up with this explosion of traffic all over the place” Fretz remembered. “The discovery mechanism of Facebook and the discovery mechanism of SEO were this incredibly powerful tool that was used a lot in those 2010s to take reasonable viewership numbers and just 100x multiply them.”
This meteoric rise in traffic in the last decade revolutionized the process and thus the philosophy behind outdoor media. Fretz elaborated: “It kind of shifted the media attention toward these other distribution methods – Google and Facebook and these like that and these massive, massive numbers that were essentially built off the back of algorithms controlled by other companies.”
As Google and Facebook's algorithms and revenue models evolved, a new paradigm emerged where generating free traffic became challenging - but the evolution of outdoor written content had already come to pass. The volume play was the new strategy. As Fretz remembered, “we were being asked to try to hit these same numbers that we were hitting before and the only way to do it was high-volume low-quality approach.”
The already evolving landscape of written content has been upended by the nature of how we happen upon websites and how we type into Google’s search bar – and the technology behind SEO has fundamentally changed how outdoor content is positioned and created. In this new paradigm, outdoor media companies must tailor their headlines and articles as much as possible toward positive search engine outcomes, or face diminishing eyes, one of the chief assets of an online, written source.
With that has come the the rise of the affiliate-link model - SEO-prioritized articles peppered with commissioned links to retail sites, where the article's site earns a small commission if the user clicks-through and purchases. This strategy has become a necessity on a subscriber-lean internet where the volume play is often the only option, and monetization of content for its own sake has proven fraught. This emphasis on directing readers to purchase gear has taken highest priority on many sites – some even legacy publications – often leaving lofty, thoughtful content as an afterthought at best, and all too often unconsidered at all.
The cozy, affiliate-link-based relationship the outdoor media world has with the industry’s manufacturers - one that necessitates an SEO-first model - is now a mainstay in the outdoor, online content world. Many e-magazines, including Outside, now the principal asset to the largest outdoor media conglomerate, Outside Inc., include an explanation of the process on their site, saying “every product featured in our editorial gear coverage has been picked—and in many cases abused—by either our editors or our team of freelance testers. We are not paid to cover the gear we write about,” continuing “that said, when you purchase a product through a link on our website, we earn an affiliate commission. This is now a common media practice used by many notable sites, including Wirecutter, Gear Patrol, and Wired.”
The affiliate-link model - and its justification - has become pervasive in outdoor online written media as adherence to SEO has pushed content more toward strategies favoring high-volume and heavy traffic. While this model is one borne from reaction to the modern media landscape, where traffic has become the dominant asset over subscribers and their dollars, its ramifications on the independence and direction of outdoor written content have been substantial.
Part III – Lines Blurred – Is That an Ad or an Article?
The distinction between journalism and paid content in the outdoor world has long had a blurry nature. While well-researched, analytical pieces certainly run, many an outdoor journalist has been prodded and wined to write a glowering gear review; many outdoor writers have padded their income by writing copy for manufacturers and brands. What would possibly constitute a conflict of interest in other industries has been part of making a living as an outdoor writer – invariably a hand-to-mouth endeavor – for years. These lines have always been a little nebulous as creators have long worked both for their publications and at the behest of manufacturers, a situation where somewhat undue influence has reigned, no matter how quietly.
This model remains, though it has entered a new phase. Conglomerates have purchased legacy outdoor media outlets and retooled them toward SEO-driven, commissioned-link revenue models. Affiliate-links within articles have become a principal revenue stream as the goodwill and traffic legacy sites built over years has been pressed toward optimized headline articles on gear. Regardless of this reality, the creators of this commission-leaning content have gone to lengths to present their prose as impartial, independent, and core to the culture. This has included eminent ski magazine Powder and mountaineer Lou Dawson’s core backcountry skiing blog WildSnow.
Lou Dawson’s WildSnow, founded in 1998 and becoming a blog in 2004, was arguably the quintessential backcountry skiing and touring site under Dawson's tutelage. Dawson – the first person to descend all of Colorado’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks on skis – spoke from a deservedly elevated perch and had a decades-long run as a commanding voice in the scene. In that time, the burgeoning ski touring subculture exploded, growing from a small fragment of the ski industry into one of its most innovative and important segments. His site would see some one-hundred-thousand page visits a month, with traffic growing as interest increased for his and other contributors’ take on gear and the culture.
In 2019, Dawson sold the blog to Wild Snow contributor, friend, and businessman Doug Stenclik. Dawson elaborated to Blister Reviews editor-in-chief Jonathan Ellsworth in a late-2021 podcast, saying “I still really enjoy blogging, have a huge emotional place for the site. It’s nice because I can stay involved and I didn’t have to do the corporate sellout.” Dawson spoke more to his desire to keep the site core to backcountry skiing, continuing, “luckily Doug saw the value in it and decided to step in and keep it going and I’m just forever grateful to that because the body of work on there is huge and it achieves more and more value as it becomes somewhat historic.” But WildSnow would not stay in Stenclik’s hands.
Stenclik sold the blog to Bardin Hill-financed AllGear Digital in December of 2022. Eric Phung, cofounder and CEO of AllGear Digital – which owns a stable of outdoor, affiliate-link heavy review sites – stated that Bardin Hill’s $40 million infusion and AllGear Digital’s subsequent purchasing of several niche-sport blogs (including The Inertia, a surfing site analogous to WildSnow) was enacted as “an opportunity for our group to double-down and reach significant scale.”
Bardin Hill describes itself on their LinkedIn page as “a leading investment firm with core competencies in public and private credit, collateralized loan obligations, and event-driven strategies.” Moreover, the firm presents its philosophy in part as focusing “on our core areas of expertise: opportunistic credit, performing credit, and merger arbitrage” and “aim[ing] to partner with high quality middle-market businesses to provide flexible solutions to alleviate liquidity pressures and/or provide growth capital.” These positionings underpin a strategy of leveraging debt and maximizing yields via scaling their financed businesses.
In their own words, AllGear Digital “owns & operates a diverse set of media properties focused on new products, the outdoors, and active-lifestyle pursuits.” Their sites include GearJunkie, Switchback Travel, The Inertia, Bikerumor, iRunFar, ExplorersWeb, and WildSnow. Each of these sites – with the exception of WildSnow and The Inertia – is openly propelled by an affiliate-link revenue model, with nearly every article on these sites beginning with “Support us! [We] may earn a small commission from affiliate links in this article. Learn More.”
The ‘Learn More’ link takes one to a lengthy privacy policy which partially details how AllGear Digital collects user data, in part stating that it may be shared with non-affiliated sites via “advertising, analytics and business partners” and that they “may share aggregated or pseudonymous information (including demographic information) with partners, such as publishers, advertisers, measurement analytics, apps or other companies.”
More visibly, AllGear Digital works to create an image of authenticity, with subsidiary sites pushing the narrative of being part of a genuine outdoor content model. Switchback Travel states that “much of our revenue comes from affiliate links, but we always retain complete editorial independence and never receive any financial compensation from manufacturers for reviews.” AllGear Digital walks the tightrope between the lofty desires of readers to consume meaningful content, and an SEO-forward, traffic-necessary affiliate link model. And they successfully blend both into a model financers are confident investing in - but one that invariably creates muddy motivations from a journalistic standpoint.
WildSnow has been essentially dormant since it was purchased by AllGear Digital - with the last posted article being a paid spot for the Ikon Pass, a departure from WildSnow's previous articles that focused on backcountry skiing.
Powder, long known as one of skiing’s most iconic, genuine publications has similarly been purchased by a conglomerate, though it has already been retooled toward an all-online, search-optimized, gear-heavy strategy. In 2019, American Media Inc. purchased Powder’s parent company TEN Publishing and their group of adrenaline sport titles, including Surfer and Snowboarder, to augment their titles such as Men’s Journal and National Enquirer. Lay-offs and bitter reactions ensued, leaving many to wonder what the future held for the venerated skiing magazine.
Roughly 18 months later American Media Inc. abruptly shuttered Powder without plans of restarting the magazine on any platform. In an October 2020 note editor Sierra Shafer stated that “our entire editorial staff will be placed on indefinite furlough, effective November 20, 2020, when operations of the magazine, our website, and our social channels will be paused. We do not know if or when this hiatus will end.” The fate of Powder seemed unknowable – the website sputtered to life occasionally with the digital uploading of vintage issues, but little new content was published.
In March of 2023, Powder came back to life, though in a much different iteration. The online-only format now tends toward editorial with attention-grabbing headlines, often reposts of social media. The new formula of the site is exemplified in pieces like "Look: Skier Pulls Off Flawless Recovery On Challenging Mogul Run" and "Skier Loses Control And Cartwheels Down The Mountain At High Speed," a 125-word attempt at viralness posted under the nebulous category 'Trending News.'
What’s more is that the new Powder (and sister site Bike), now without a subscription model, have quietly incorporated an affiliate-link strategy via their robust ‘Gear Locker’ category. Reviews abound of skis, outerwear, and accessories, where specs and best-use are discussed, nearly always including links to retailers Backcountry.com or evo.com. Their ‘best-of’ lists begin with an overview, listing their top picks in bullet point next to affiliate links.
Powder is transparent about their process; what's unclear is their claim that their affiliate-link procedure offers their writers independence. Their statement says in part “in many of our reviews you’ll see a link to buy the item being reviewed. These are affiliate links, they’ll send you to one of our partner’s sites where you can purchase the gear we’re writing about. These links don’t cost you anything, but help us pay our writers, without compromising their integrity.”
Powder further defends itself in a piece entitled “Bought and Paid For,” where lead reviewer Cy Whitling details the various pitfalls and conflicts of interest possible in the gear review space and how Powder mitigates them. Speaking to the hypothetical question, “How much influence is too much influence?” Whitling deflects: “If you answer that question with ‘any,’ good luck in your black and white world. The question of influence and power dynamics in gear reviews is rarely cut and dried. Humans are influenced by so many small factors at every point in our lives that it’s impossible to isolate all those influences. And that’s especially true in a really personal industry like skiing or mountain biking.”
Regarding affiliate-links, the article states “yes, many of our reviews contain affiliate links where we earn a small commission on any products you buy through those links. We always label those articles with a disclaimer. We are in no way pressured to only review gear we can make affiliate revenue off of. Instead we write about what we want to write about, and if it happens to be available at an affiliate outlet, we link it. If it’s not, we don’t.”
While Powder takes steps to allay any misgivings readers may have about their gear review revenues, the question of how this SEO-driven, affiliate-link model influences the universal direction of the publication remains. How this impacts what topics the magazine now covers – and how insulated from analysis affiliate partners are – is not directly acknowledged, and remains an open question.
Part IV – SEO as the New Content Driver
This new model of online revenue generation a la outdoor written content – based heavily on robust SEO models whose goal is commission revenue via affiliate-link purchases – is no fluke; it’s no fad. The implementation of these models has been executed by firms managed by brilliant wealth creators who – most tellingly – are financed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Private equity and venture capitalist firms are chiefly concerned with generating a return for their shareholders. Their management of risk is of paramount importance; their ability to innovate their monetization tools knows few boundaries. Affiliate-link models of revenue generation through outdoor written media work. They wouldn't find funding if they didn’t. And what works is a devotion to SEO; article titles and content that move to the top of Google searches, interspersed with ‘buy-from-here’ commissioned links.
The internet has fundamentally changed our lives, and the outdoor industry is no exception. What was once a small corner of commerce has become incredibly popular and lucrative. It has increasingly moved away from physical interactions in stores, and in turn has grown into a powerful and competitive economic force, bringing attention from disparate businesses interests. They bring to the fold massive fundings, adeptness, and an unwavering desire for success. Their ability to monetize has had wide impacts on the scope of the outdoor business. And the close relationship that the manufacturers and writers have always had in the outdoor world has been evermore drawn into the fold, and evermore justified.
SEO-driven business models bring an ease and robustness to the consumer aspect of the outdoor culture. But the sword cuts both ways – we as individuals rarely use eloquent prose when engaging Google search; we are taught from a young age that a solid internet query is to the point, straight-forward. As outdoor enthusiasts we follow suit; we are typically searching for quick answers and entertainment, not lofty, abstract ideas about the culture. Thus the proliferation of articles entitled ‘Best Backcountry Skis,’ over deeper coverage of the outdoor world.
This paradigm is not new – in his recent forward to the digital upload of Powder’s September 1976 issue, Hans Ludwig notices “the non-ski-review interviews with ski company product managers marks a first chapter in what would be a long battle between a readership that wanted gear info, advertisers who wanted free content, and editors who felt that gear geekery and consumerism is a distraction.”
But while the template for these relationships in outdoor media has been with us for some time, the execution of this strategy has entered a unique stage. The power of online technology has been pressed into the service of retail and consumption and influenced nearly every publication in the culture; the distinctions between content, advertisements, and retail have become all the more blurred across the entire culture. Revenue models and exposure strategies foster a content environment where motivations are more nebulous than ever, and execution favors retail-favorable editorial over deeper, independent analysis of the culture. Now difficult to monetize - especially compared to affiliate-link gear articles - outdoor content for its own sake may never again reclaim the standing it once had.
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