We have been tracking a data point this year where we look at a cohort of races that were on our platform in both 2019 and 2022 by the month the race occurred. Meaning we looked at races that happened in October of this year (2022), and compared if they were also on our platform in 2019 so we could have a direct comparison of the level of participant return.
The bad news for the year is that races are down 15% on average. The somewhat good news is that things seem to be improving with October down only 9%. This fits August down 8%, and if Hurricane Ian had not significantly impacted the last 1-2 weekends of September, we feel September would have been down about 10% or less as well.
Here are the totals by month for this year:
As we have covered in previous reports of this data (Our Q3 Report and our Market Analysis), it is taken from our monthly churn analysis where we dig into races over 500 in 2019 to track and compare with what has happened to them this year. Some of the other key data:
No Race: 21%. When put into context of a 3 year period of time, this is about 7% per year, which is not far off the pre-pandemic average of a a little less than 6%.
We also track competitor churn, which was a loss of 12 races, or 5%. Although 8 of those were races that Gannett bought as part of their roll up strategy of Rugged Maniac, Hot Chocolate, Ram Racing, Enmotive and IMAthlete. (as an aside all of Gannett including the newspapers and other events they own is only worth $211M as of this morning after what is looking like over leverage and a failed strategy).
Here is a full summary of the data we track as shown for October, 2022 in comparison to October, 2019:
We hope this data helps race directors understand what is happening in the broader market and will continue to share what we find. Hopefully things keep improving and we are back toward more normal numbers in 2023, although we have doubts about overall industry growth.
We are also putting out content to help race directors grow again (there are an increasing number of races that are growing!). Here is a link to a webinar we just did, and below is the video:
As well as one on leveraging pricing and referrals to grow your event: