We have been doing the US race registration market analysis every 6 months for many years. We include a ton of analytical data, and also include our analysis of happenings and directions in the market (of course that analysis is done from our perspective and is sometimes biting to competitors, but tries to be honest). This began because we as a business need to take a hard look at how we are doing against a competitive landscape and figured as long as we were doing the analysis, we would share it.
Here are the old Market Analysis reports: 9/15, 3/16, 9/16, 3/17, 9/17, 3/18, 9/18, 3/19, 9/19, 4/20, 9/20, 9/21, 9/21, 3/22, 9/22, 3/23, 9/23.
Also see our 2023 Race Trends Report, 2023 Largest 100 Races Report and our own 2023 Year in Review for more information on the state of the endurance community. Bob does a video summary of this blog here.
Races Return to Growth
We will lead off this report with the good news that races that have happened so far in 2024 (January and February) have returned to growth! This chart shows races that were on RunSignup in both 2023 and 2024 grew an average of 7% in each month. We had seen in our Annual Trends Report that overall races were only down 1% from 2019 to 2023, so this appears to be real and legitimate growth. We will of course watch this trend carefully and update when we finish Q1 and each quarter.
This growth is welcome news for races. As we look at the vendor side, it will also help the registration vendors (rising tides lift all boats).
Race Churn
Race churn is a measurement of the number of races that happened in the past, but did not happen this year. There are two reasons for “churn” – one is the race simply does not repeat. These are most often smaller events, so the impact on overall registrations is somewhat muted by the churn when looking at the race community as a whole. The other type of churn is when a race moves to another platform – we track this to see if we are on a trend of not doing a good job for our customers.
The chart below is a measurement of only races that are over 500 participants. For industry impact, look at the column in red, and it shows that churn has reached the more pre-pandemic numbers of ~5%.
Vendor Market Share – RunSignup Approaching 50%
The data points to RunSignup continuing to dominate the market share of endurance events in the US with growing registration and event numbers and very minimal (~1-2%) competitor churn recently. This shows up in our tracking of events on our platform that happened in January and February:
It also shows in the registration numbers, which were up 14% in 2023 from 2022 and up 37% from 2019, and up 13.6%.
While the tide appears to be rising this year, our RunSignup boat is floating even higher. We still feel comfortable saying we appear to have about 40-45% of the US market, and we feel this market share continues to grow about 5% each year – so we should approach the 50% share sometime in the next year.
One of our traditional charts is showing the number of races on RunSignup and Active appearing on the RunningUSA race list (pink SignUp buttons are on RunSignup and Grey “Register Now – A” buttons are Active, each pulled via API from our respective race lists). We have kept track of this for a long time is the % of events on RunningintheUSA.com that have a RunSignup registration link. RunSignup market share grew to 57% in April 2024:
The other good news is that the number of races increased from March of 2023 – 39,297 to 40,284 – 2.5% growth in the number of races on RunningintheUSA.net:
The other non-exact way of measuring data is from comparing web traffic. We had to shift to SimilarWeb in September, 2022. However, their metrics seem to have shifted, throwing off previous measurements, so we can not really measure change. What we have done with the chart this year is show the number of Visits (on RunSignup the average is 5.1 pages per visit) and the relative Visit traffic compared with all of our domains, including RunSignup.com, TicketSignup.io, GiveSignup.org, and the growing number of websites (nearing 2,000) we host for customers for free (eg. ScottCoffeeRun.com rather than RunSignup.com/ScottCoffeeRun). RunSignup makes up about 80% of this traffic, with TicketSignup and GiveSignup accounting for about 2% and our customer’s domains accounting for nearly 20%.
So in the example above, Race Roster in the US is about 20% of the visits as RunSignup – implying that RunSignup has about 5X the number of visitors as Race Roster.
Industry Observations
Atlanta Track Club Moves from Haku to Let’s Do This
The big move in the past six months was in January when the Atlanta Track Club (ATC) moved from Haku to Let’s Do This (LDT). Rich Kenah, the ATC CEO talked about the “losses for the past two years” the club had incurred on the annual Townhall published on Facebook Live (his comments came about 23 minutes into the video). That may have been some of the motivation as LDT is known to be very aggressive in going after new business, paying some customers up front cash or promising growth rates contractually.
Let’s Do This
LDT took a Series B venture round of $60 Million in 2022 and have been going after large races like London Marathon and now ATC.
LDT is spending a lot. The UK has public disclosure on companies like LDT. December 2022 was the last period reported and it is not a full income statement, but this shows a summary of their losses in pounds at £15 Million (roughly $19 Million):
ATC was not a customer and we have no real visibility of what happened there. We have had other customers try LDT out in the past and the results were not impressive in terms of participant impact, and the technology is still very immature with lots of data issues and common features missing. Reports from timers have been especially critical of the data and reporting.
It will be very interesting to see what happens with LDT over the coming years. From where we sit, it does not appear they are growing fast enough, nor winning a broad enough set of customers (even if they won all Top 100 customers, it would only represent about 6% of participants). They also have a lot of software to build, and hope that early customer frustrations do not impact the ability to gain new customers.
LDT also needs to figure out how to satisfy investor demand for a return on their investment of around $80 Million. From where we sit at RunSignup, with approaching 50% market share, it is not obvious how you could ever earn that much of a return even if they displace us.
Haku
To be honest, it was very surprising to see ATC leave Haku. Our impression of Haku is that they work very hard to make their customers happy with a ton of on site support and doing custom development for them. Chicago recently extended a multi-year agreement with Haku.
That said, from a RunSignup perspective we do not see Haku having much impact on our business in the near to mid term. They have a radically different model that has higher cost factors to it. They have a narrower product set than RunSignup for endurance with few of the race day tools we have. They also are not a self serve platform where people can just go set up a race and know the pricing – it is a “Call Us” type of organization. We believe that an increasing percentage of race directors and timers want to have direct control of their setup, management and reporting. And the onsite support can be far more productively provided by local timers.
We also see them spreading themselves fairly thin by going after large events in Europe (where the margins for race registration are much tighter – see the Njuko discussion below). They are also going after nonprofit customers and recently introduced an auction function. To be fair, this is somewhat similar to RunSignup expanding into Tickets and P2P Events and likely reuses much of their infrastructure.
Race Roster / Njuko / Asics
Race Roster is the second largest registration provider in the US, and could well be the largest in the world given their near monopoly in Canada, their acquisitions in Japan and Australia and of course Njuko in Europe and now worldwide. At the RunningUSA Conference in January, Alex stated worldwide registrations at 12 Million.
First Race Roster in the US. As we reported several months ago, Race Roster raised prices significantly:
| Race Roster | RunSignup | RunSignup > 5,000 Reg | |
| Per participant | $1.99 | – | – |
| Per Transaction | – | $1.00 | $.80 |
| Per Transaction | 6.99% | 6% Donations 4% | 4.8% |
This results in price differences that add up when multiplied by hundreds or thousands of registrations:
| Race Roster | RunSignup | Difference | |
| 1 X $10 | $2.69 | $1.60 | $1.09 |
| 2 X $10 | $5.38 | $2.20 | $3.18 |
| 1 X 50 | $5.49 | $4.00 | $1.49 |
| 2 X 50 | $10.98 | $7.00 | $3.98 |
| 1 X 100 | $8.98 | $7.00 | $1.98 |
| 2 X 100 | $17.99 | $13.00 | $4.99 |
In addition they reportedly charge $0.85 + 6% for donations (we charge a flat 4%). They also charge $1.95 for transfers (we do not charge for transfers).
The other thing we have noticed is a significant drop in sales activity. Two years ago they were offering sweetheart deals to large races to move over. We reported back in 2022 how our customers were complaining to us about how much the Race Roster reps were calling them. We are also seeing some migration of Race Roster customers to our platform this year, much more significantly than previous years.
Njuko is the big wild card when looking at Race Roster and Asics. While most people in the US have never heard of Njuko, they are the largest registration vendor in a pretty fractured European market. They also serve customers worldwide. The big strategic question is how does Asics view these two platforms? Do they want to support the development, sales and operations costs of two platforms or consolidate somehow? Njuko is the newer platform from a development stack perspective having rolled out a new generation over the past several years to replace their older generation. Also, their pricing is drastically lower than Race Roster – $0.35 per registration. This price does not include payment processing fees from say Stripe of 30 cents + 2.9%.
This pricing begs the question of where does Asics want to steer the business?
Another interesting first is that we had seen Rock n Roll Las Vegas was briefly taking 2025 registrations via Njuko. Registration is off at the time of this writing, but that would be a pretty big win for Njuko and a nice opening for them in the US market, potentially creating confusion for Race Roster customers.
Gannett / Ventures Endurance / EnMotive
Gannett has had a tough past half year. Brad Scudder, one of the top people within Gannett in the Ventures Endurance division, left in October. Adam Swansen (who has timed over 1 million participants) left EnMotive to join Big River. And Matt Downin joined us after parting ways with EnMotive. Gannett made a decision to shut down the Rugged Maniac Series of obstacle races, which was a large internal client for EnMotive registration.
These are some of the difficulties of having a large parent organization like Gannet own a race registration platform.
Summary
Again, this is our internal analysis where we assess the market and see if there are things that we could be doing better and if there are any significant threats to our business. The short answer is that things look good for us to approach 50% market share over the next year and continue to grow beyond. We have a number of strategic strengths:
- Employee Owned – This gives us very long term time horizons for investing in our products and our customers. We are not being directed (or undirected) by a big company that owns us, or by investors who demand a specific return of their money in 7 years, or are worried about this quarter, or who turn off the money spigot suddenly. We are profitable and growing incrementally. See some current thoughts from Bob on long term thinking.
- More Software – The key to our customers in this market is software. We simply have a better and broader set of features than our competitors, and are actually accelerating our development. In addition, since we are 50% of the market, we can afford more software development than anyone else. And since we also have TicketSignup and GiveSignup P2P revenue also feeding our common development platform, our capacity is even greater.
- Customers Like Us – Our customers seem to like us. We have good technology and we have great support. And we cost less. This means they refer their friends (which keeps our costs low), and they bring more and more business onto our platform. And our customers grow their business year after year with us as shown in this cohort analysis.
We love what we do, and it is so fulfilling to see the wide adoption of what we are building for our customers. We thank all of you for your support.