Millions of Views, Zero Podiums
The New Generation of Outdoor Creators on YouTube Looks Nothing Like What We've Seen Before.
When Candide Thovex and Quicksilver dropped the first two “One of Those Days” videos on YouTube within 18 months of each other in 2013-2015, it seemed that an earthquake was about to hit the outdoor industry.
Here was an individual athlete, not reliant on distribution through a major film production company, racking up millions of views on a rapidly developing platform. The narrative seemed obvious: YouTube would become the athlete-driven video hub of the outdoor world.
But then… it never really happened.
Instead, Instagram skyrocketed, and square photos became the defining medium for athletes for the next decade.
Today, relatively few of the athletes who have achieved the highest levels of success as measured in “traditional” terms — brand sponsorships, podiums, film parts, magazine covers — have truly thrived on YouTube. Rather, we’ve seen a decade of (often amazing) short-form films distributed via brand YouTube channels, while a different generation athlete-creators has quietly built massive media platforms.
The result is the emergence of a profoundly new landscape of outdoor influence. The content-driven algorithms of YouTube and TikTok represent the future, and they’re dominated by a different cohort than Instagram. The new creator-athletes have different storytelling skillsets, new voices and operate in a much less coherent ecosystem.
Whether this is good or bad is up for grabs, but one thing is certain — it is already creating new winners and losers.
Instagram Created the Previous Attention Ecosystem. YouTube Is the Next One.
I think two foundational factors explain why Instagram became the athletes’ preferred channel so rapidly. First, the content format made it easy to onboard onto Instagram, and second, Meta’s social graph allowed athletes to turn real world celebrity into a massive growth tailwind.
In the mid 2010s, the leap for photographers and athletes from commercial and editorial photography to Instagram was small. Photographers had extensive catalogs gathering dust because magazines wouldn’t run two-year-old photos. Upload those photos to Instagram and voila, you have a pretty damn good Instagram feed, especially in the early days of square photos.
"Relatively few outdoor athletes who have achieved success by traditional metrics — sponsorships, podium finishes, film segments, magazine covers — have genuinely thrived on YouTube or TikTok."
Athletes, as their constant collaborators, built on this momentum. Meta products operate on the theory of a social graph, so the size of your fan or friend network and the density of your connections matter a lot for audience growth and distribution. That’s why Instagram has always thrived on real-world celebrity, which athletes had at some level.
Additionally, since brands were already pouring money into Facebook, they easily extended ad campaigns to Instagram, boosting athlete audience growth as a side-effect.
But YouTube was inherently a different beast. It often requires net-new content, which either means significant editing or new content creation. It might take an entire winter to create a 10-minute ski video. Since video archives retain real value, filmmakers were reluctant to give away their catalogs on YouTube, and sometimes filmmakers didn’t even have long-term usage rights to do so.
These economics meant that instead of athletes building their own YouTube channels, we got a golden age of brand videos, from YETI to Patagonia, Salomon to The North Face, and many more.
Meanwhile, many of us, myself included, helped brands and athletes maximize Instagram’s rapid growth era, and often pigeonholed YouTube as a streaming tool to use for website embeds, much like Vimeo. Over time, athletes have launched their own small production companies, but the incredible effort required to make a winning sports edit doesn’t always equate to YouTube success.
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Secondly, YouTube, and now TikTok, operate on a more content-driven algorithm rather than a social-graph. These platforms don’t emphasize content posted by your friends and friends-of-friends, they focus on various measures of content virality, regardless of audience size. As Gary Vaynerchuk says in the video above, his massive social following no longer equates to social reach.
Interestingly, this history mirrors what happened in traditional media. Publishers eagerly jumped onto Meta products, pumping free content and ad spend into the platforms in exchange for website traffic. YouTube never drove website visits and therefore was far less used by media. Same with TikTok. Media’s brand awareness created rapid channel Facebook and Instagram growth, but far less predictable value on content-driven algorithms. In retrospect, it’s clear that Meta’s strategies favored incumbents, both brands and individuals, while it’s far less clear who wins on YouTube and TikTok.
As we look at the next phase of the attention economy, a few trends seem likely to define the future.
1. This is a bigger shift than many anticipate.
YouTube will continue to reward a different profile of creator. Certainly, the next generation of sponsored athletes will be better represented on YouTube, but in the future, many of the most influential people in outdoors will be YouTube creators first, athletes second.
In the future, many of the most influential people in outdoors will be YouTube creators first, athletes second.
Yes, it’s amateur hour on YouTube, but if even a fraction of a percent of the content output is really good, that’s still more good content than traditional media or brands can make.
In a recent article on The Mediator, Doug Shapiro makes a vital point: It doesn’t matter that 99.9% of creator-athlete content is boring, poorly executed and low-quality.
“No one watches, listens to or plays most of the stuff on YouTube, Spotify or even Steam. On average, it is crap. The other thing about this criticism is that it is irrelevant... [T]he average is inconsequential. What matters is the head of the curve, the most popular stuff. That’s what’s competing for consumers’ time. And the ‘quality’ of the head will likely keep getting better relative to corporate-produced content.”
Whether your sport is climbing, skiing, cycling or anything else, there’s a whole network of sports creators who are generating tens of millions of video views, using entirely different formats than the classic pro-athlete action video.
Case in point: Consider Sammy Carlson’s incredible new video vs. the content that steepsteep is producing. And if you really want to highlight the difference, throw in a heavy storytelling and social messaging brand video from The North Face or Arc’Teryx. My bet is that there’s still massive upside potential in content like what steepsteep makes.
2. Creators will increasingly squeeze traditional media.
Traditional and digital media brands face the same challenge. They’ll struggle to compete on YouTube, leaving gaps that agile creators and small media brands can fill with gear reviews, travel stories and more.
As pointed out in the chart below, attention is a zero-sum game, and the success of this new cohort of creators will come at the expense of traditional media, not as additional viewing time.
If you’re an advertiser, or a consumer, how do you weigh a traditional brand buyer’s guide vs. the always excellent gear reviews on The Ride with Ben Delaney? Adventure Addicts have racked up 33 million views on their channel doing travel and gear reviews. It’s hard to find “traditional” outdoor media brands that can match that level of engagement.
The data is hard to find, but I imagine that the difference between audience attention and advertising spend looks much like Mary Meeker’s annual presentations in the 2010s that always showed digital media attention far outpacing digital ad spend. Eventually that gap will close here too.
3. Professional athletes aren’t immune.
Over at “A Matter of Brand,” Matt Trappe points out that “Brands are allocating their marketing spend towards content creators, reducing budget available for standard athlete contracts. Brands are also expecting professional athletes to create highly produced content to sell product. Many athletes are pushing back, stating that they aren’t here to make cute Instagram Reels–they’re here to make teams and win medals.”
It’s a good point, and particularly valid in sports with a clear competitive scene to sort the best from the rest. In outdoor pursuits that lack an Olympics or Boston marathon to define the top of the game, the athlete-creator split gets awfully murky.
But athletes are paid to bring attention to their sponsors, whether by standing atop a podium, making a banger film segment or now creating on social media. Would a less accomplished athlete with a strong TikTok game give your brand more visibility than a professional athlete getting top 10 in a race with limited media coverage?
That’s a hard question. I am a massive believer in both creator content and athlete-driven marketing, and I think the two serve different purposes. But there’s no question that they are competing for the same dollars.
I am a massive believer in both creator content and athlete-driven marketing, but there’s no question that they are competing for the same dollars.
Of course, some athletes succeed wherever they go. Adam Ondra is both one of the greatest climbers of all time, and incredibly successful on YouTube, Instagram and probably anything else he sets his mind to.
Plus I’m not ready to downplay the authenticity and inspiration that high-level achievement brings. This summer I’ve enjoyed watching Alexey Vermullen’s YouTube channel, and it’s certainly more compelling knowing that he’s a top-tier gravel racer, and he’s often covering races I find interesting.
4. Micro-niches and the future of content
There’s one other factor underpinning much of this change. We’re not just moving from mainstream culture into tighter areas of interest; we’re moving to an attention economy of micro-niches within interest areas.
Attention is splintering, and if micro-niches become a defining feature of media, then we may have reached the point where even a media brand dedicated to a sport — climbing, skiing, running or cycling — is too broad.
According to a YouTube trends report, in these hyper-targeted interest areas, the line between community member and creator disappears.
“Fans aren’t just consuming their favorite content anymore — they’re actively in conversation with it — creating their own videos to showcase their devotion to the source material and to strengthen bonds with other fans.”
Perhaps nothing is more ripe for this kind of uber-engagement than outdoor sports, which are participatory by nature. Since most YouTube creators don’t have brand-sponsored travel budgets, they’re often creating in exactly this kind of conversational relationship: climbing and riding locally, sometimes meeting with a sponsored pro, but often making lower-budget projects that are highly focused in geography and a personal niche.
Traditional media aren’t staffed to win in a hyper-focused content world, but a media-brand-of-one that can build a niche following may be able to survive, or at least create a side-hustle to stay close to their favorite sport.
5. What’s Next
For those of us in the outdoor content-creation industry — athletes, media, photographers, filmmakers — the challenge is to figure out how to build sustainable businesses in a media landscape that favors content over brand, niche over broad and individuals over companies. The next cohort of creators will deeply challenge existing models, and likely leave us with an athlete and media environment that looks very different.
It’s not all fresh tracks and high-fives for the creators either. Minus the infrastructure of media companies, most of them will struggle to make their outdoor career more than a small side-hustle. All of our sports benefit from having a class of professional athletes to inspire us with accomplishments that are nearly impossible to pull off as a side job. The question will be how to justify the expense.
Luckily, people who love the outdoors are really good at moving forward even when the path is uncertain.