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, 3/24, 9/24.
Races Are Growing
2024 was a record year for participant count as well as revenue for races, and 2025 looks like continued growth. Race participation grew 8% last year and revenue grew by 12% in 2024. Starting off this year, race participation is up 4% and revenue is up ~6%.
California Triathlon issued an interesting report showing the gradual decline of triathlon events over the past 13 years.
Vendor Market Share – RunSignup Hits 50%
We estimate that RunSignup has hit about 50% of the race registration market and it seems to be continuing. We saw a 12% increase in races last year, and we are seeing record onboarding of new races so far this year. This chart shows the number of races using RunSignup each month:
Churn also remains very small. Races not occurring the next year has returned to historical norms of about 5%. Competitor churn was only 1.2% in the past 14 months. Note: We only track races over 500 participants with this report since it is semi-manual.
Referring back to the California Tri report, RunSignup saw 165,945 registrations for triathlons on our platform in 2024. CalTri saw the market as 302,000 finishers. We don’t have Ironman, and assuming they have about 20% of the market, that leaves ~240,000. This implies RunSignup has a triathlon market share of about 67% excluding Ironman and 54% including Ironman.
We use SimilarWeb to try to estimate web traffic. Adding up the traffic from the competitors listed on this chart (excluding Active since that website is used mostly for their non-endurance businesses as we will show below), our listed competitors have about 2.8 Million Visits compared with the 5.3 Million visits to RunSignup based races in January, 2025. The largest competitor is Race Roster. RunSignup US traffic is about 6 times the Race Roster US traffic. We also continue to slowly catch up to Eventbrite. Note this excludes customers hosting their private domains on our website (about 3,000 events) as well as our GiveSignup.org and TicketSignup.io websites.
We also look at RunningintheUSA.com, the largest and best race calendar listing website in the US. They take API feeds of all races on RunSignup and Active (which was the dominant vendor when we started 15 years ago), and they hand curate other races. They list over 40,000 races. We hand count a sample of 500 races held on April 12, 2025 to get these numbers since it is simple to see which races are listed on RunSignup and Active. Note, we jump over series that are on RunSignup like Healthy Kids or the Pirate runs so they do not skew the data) RunSignup is at 59% of the races listed, another indication we have hit 50% market share.
Finally, we take a look at the Top 100 from 2024. Note the Top 100 races had about 1.8 Million participants in 2024 (RunSignup had 9.7 Million registrations in 2024). RunSignup continues to hold the most Top 100 events at 19, below the 50% market share we garner in the rest of the market. This is due to many of the competitors being financed by outside parties and willing to “invest” in winning some of these customers. We expect Haku to take the top spot next year since they have won NYRR, which as several “In-House” Top 100 races in the 2024 list.
Competitor Analysis
We started this bi-annual analysis to help us take a step back and evaluate the business and our competitive positioning. We continue to believe that we have significantly expanded what the scope of a registration platform is in the past 15 years. When we started, it was just processing credit cards and collecting basic information. Registration and participant management features have expanded, but also marketing capabilities have expanded. We have become convinced the huge investments we made in true Event Powered Email and Website capability requires a size and skill of a development team that is funded by a customer base that only RunSignup enjoys. Our RaceDay products is also a hige investment that no other vendor is able to make. Said another way, other vendors simply do not generate enough revenue to afford developing the breadth of platform we have for events. Nor are competitors able to spread their costs over such a huge base of customers, so they are forced to charge more for the features they have.
We think there will always be competitors. Either vendors who find a niche market to fill – either geographically or by customer type. For example the tiny registration product that Bolder Boulder uses is a local company the race has used for years and there is sense of comfort and loyalty there. Or Haku, who focuses on adding custom development and onsite support to win customers like NYRR.
We think that many vendors benefited from the growth of the endurance community last year, which might have led them to believe they were growing more than they actually were. This could come back to bite some of those companies if they increased their expenses or relied too heavily on investor money. As we discussed in full in last September’s Market Analysis, there is a long track record of train wrecks with customers getting surprised by the closing of their vendor.
Enmotive
Enmotive was a major topic last September since Gannett had only recently announced the closing of that registration vendor, forcing customers to scramble for a new vendor. What we expected back then was that the non-Gannett owned races would go to a variety of vendors, with RunSignup capturing the bulk of those. Indeed, that is what happened and we will gain about 150-200,000 registrations on our platform from races who migrate over to us this year.
Haku was expected to get the Gannett owned events like Hot Chocolate, but that did not happen. What we think happened is that Hot Chocolate needed certain features but Haku made a decision to focus on their NYRR development work. Gannett decided to keep Enmotive for one more year for their own events. They brought back the developer after telling him he was laid off (what an emotional roller coaster for the people involved). We shall see what happens with these events in the future.
Race Roster
We have seen a lot of movement of Race Roster customers to RunSignup. We have probably won about 150,000 registrations from them in the past 6 months or so. Race Roster is obviously going thru some changes as they have laid off some of their sales and support team (we do not have visibility into how far this reached). One of the customers who recently moved over said to us this week “I wish I had done this years ago. You guys have everything and it is so much better.” We continue to see Race Roster opportunities now that they appear to be slowing development and cutting headcount and not being as aggressive on pricing.
Fee Transparency is also hurting them. Customers now can see just how high their pricing is. There is inconsistent pricing of Asics low cost Njuko brand registration platform mostly in Europe and Race Roster’s fees. We find it hard to believe that Asics will want to keep developing two registration platforms over time. Perhaps they are treating Race Roster as more and more of a cash cow to fund Njuko?
We have also heard they raised their Canadian prices to $2.99 per participant + 10%. Canadian customers are begging us to enter Canada, but we have decided not to do so in the foreseeable future. We are seeing some other companies like Race Entry and Movemint enter Canada since Race Roster is an easier target than RunSignup. It does seem like a ripe market for the right company.
Haku
The big news is that NYRR is migrating from their own internally built system to Haku in mid March:
We estimate this to be about $50 Million of payment processing per year (RunSignup will do about $620 Million in 2025). We are happy for Haku, as NYRR is used to more custom development rather than using a platform like RunSignup. Hopefully Haku is being compensated for this well, and it does not have a distraction impact on their other customers. We have seen only a couple of Haku customers move to our platform and do not expect any big migrations, or any real risk that Haku will get into serious financial trouble in the near to mid term. Long term they will have to figure out a way to deal with technical debt and multiple customizations and onsite race presence costs.
Let’s Do This
Let’s Do This (LDT) continues to press hard for growth. Marry Wittenberg, former NYRR CEO, is now the lead sales person for LDT in the US. She is leveraging her network as well as making cold calls on customers with the line “I’ve always admired your race and would love to learn more about what you do.” And then the meeting turns to selling LDT.
We still have a fundamental doubt about how their investors, who have put about $100 Million into the company, will ever recover their investment. The endurance market is just not that big, and LDT is not a very big part of the market.
For example, since they were founded, they only have 3 Million registrations. Also, someone with access to SERP (an SEO tool) forwarded this graph of organic LDT traffic in the UK, which has peaked and is flat to down. Organic traffic of 90k per month is very low.
US traffic makes up about 35% of their total worldwide traffic and shows about 55K visitors per month. Please note that these SEO tools are not always accurate as the tool we use shows LDT to have US traffic of 216K visits per month. That difference might be visitors vs. visits – the 55K visitors visited the site 4 times each?
The fundamental problem LDT has is that their business strategy is based on being a marketplace, and they simply do not have the traffic to justify that as a strategy. They are still a long, long way from being a marketplace (RunSignup had over 5 Million visits in that comparable month, ~25X the traffic).
LDT is also buying customers. We have lost two customers to them this coming year. Last year Diplo had two 5K runs on our platform, and this year’s series will be larger and International. They have chosen to go with LDT. They asked us for special financial terms, which we were not willing to meet. That is a loss of about 20,000 registrations out of the 9.7 Million we did last year. The second customer is Vacation Races, who was Acquired by Y11, which also owns Motive. Motive has been an Active customer, but was trying to move to LDT a couple of years ago. It was never clear quite why that did not happen. Motive has made the decision to move Vacation Races from RunSignup to LDT over the next year. This was a little less than a 1% customer for RunSignup last year, so it is a decent size customer that we are sad to see go after nearly a decade working together.
AthleteReg / BikeReg
BikeReg was acquired as part of the acquisition spree that Outside Magazine did a few years ago. This report says there were 44 total companies acquired, and 16 have been shut down, 3 have been sold and 3 have been merged. They have also had 3 rounds of layoffs totaling over 150 people. We do not know how this has impacted BikeReg. But it does have echoes of what happened at Competitor Group and the eventual shutdown of RaceIt (We have a number of former RaceIt employees at RunSignup). It also might be similar to what has happened with Enmotive, since Gannett’s publication business is under pressure as online continues to cut into print publications.
AI Will Help RunSignup and Our Customers
RunSignup has declared this the Year of AI for our company. We think it will have far reaching impacts on the productivity of our company and our customers. There are several areas it will impact:
- Development productivity with AI will lower the cost and time to develop features. We are estimating an increase of 10-20%, and that is conservative. We already have examples of 5 day projects becoming 1 day projects (although that is the exception still rather than the rule – but “today’s AI is the worst AI we will ever use”). This means we could do maybe 3,000 releases a year rather than the 2,300 we did in 2024.
- Customer Support via AI powered Chatbots. We recently turned this on as an option in Beta mode on our support portal and are already seeing customers getting correct answers and enjoying the experience. We are also seeing customers use chatbots on their websites to reduce customer support.
- Customers Building Dashboards and Applications with AI Tools using the RunSignup API. We have published our first blog showing how to do this, and we have a lot more examples and improvements on the way. Our API has always been an advantage, but now it enables any customer to build what they want.
We feel we have a few natural advantages in leveraging AI to help our customers and our business.
- RunSignup API. We have the best, most stable, fastest and reliable API in the event market. The third bullet point above is a strategic advantage because our development team just expanded infinitely.
- Content. AI loves content, and we have been pushing great, product based content for the past 15 years. We have over 1,000 blog posts, our websites have hundreds of pages, we have over 300 Support articles that are detailed and kept up to date, and we have over 1,600 videos. Everyone has all of that available to them in their favorite chat tool today – ask ChatGPT or Claude for help in assigning bibs in RunSignup. As we curate this to produce more on-site chatbots (like what we just released in Beta), that content will be even more powerful. Our products will just be easier to use because AI will help our customers use them. Our content is also useful for events to host their own chatbots because those chatbots can use the content on RunSignup like how to transfer from the marathon to the half.
- Our Culture Embraces Change. We have a technical company. We have a desire to learn and grow – it is a Guiding Principle. There is no fear of failure here – in fact we love to learn from failure. What we abhor is resistance to change. We started pushing hard on AI on January 20, and in less than 2 months we have made a ton of progress. People are excited to share what they have learned and how to leverage it. We will move faster than any of our competitors who might be hung up on big company politics, or people who fear their jobs will be taken. Since we are employee owned, we know if we can be first and best with leveraging AI, we will continue to win and keep customers and assure our long term success.
AI Risks to Our Business
While we embrace AI enthusiastically, there are two potential threats that we are paying attention to.
- Our Competitors Use it Better. If our competitors leverage AI better or faster than we do, then they will gain an advantage in releasing software and improving efficiency. This is a strong motivating factor for us to stay ahead.
- Customers Use AI to Build Their Own. While it is unrealistic to think that even AI can replace the experience, depth of real world experience and 2 million lines of code and 2,700 database tables that make up RunSignup, lower end customers may well indeed develop their own solutions to selling tickets and registrations with AI. Thinking back to the original versions of RunSignup, or some of the low end ticket vendors we see, AI could be used to cobble together a website and sell tickets and process transactions on something like Stripe relatively easily. This is why we are investing in deep levels of solutions for our customers – Websites, EMail, TXT Marketing, RaceDay Checkin and Scoring, Participant Management and our patent pending ticket technology MTE Timed Entry. Many smaller events do not have the time, even with the help of AI to develop such solutions. And many events have enough advanced needs that AI will not be able to quickly develop enough software to meet their needs. We will be monitoring this closely in the coming years in this report.
Summary
Our RunSignup endurance business is strong and getting stronger. We take our role as the leader in the market seriously and will not rest on our laurels. We will continue to push the bounds of what we can do for our customers and deliver the best product and service at the lowest price.
In addition, our stability offers customers and partners a long term platform that can be counted on to continue to get better and better. We think this is a winning combination from the employee owners of RunSignup.
We thank all of our customers and partners for your support!