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The High Route Podcast: explore the world of human powered backcountry travel involving turns on snow.
Episode One of The high Route Podcast which explores the world of backcountry skiing. We interview Caley Fretz, co-founder and edior in chief of Escape Collecitve.
The High Route: We'll start with the simple part. This is episode one of the high route podcast. The high route is a new reader supported website launching September 1, the high route will focus on human powered backcountry riding, the kind where folks make turns on snow. And by the way, I'm Jason Albert, founder and editor of the hy route. Here's the slightly more complex part. So listen up. To find the website, you'll need to know how to type a hyphen, like find it on the keyboard. The website can be found out and this is all one word. Okay, here we go. The hyphen high hyphen route.com. One more time, the hyphen high hyphen route.com. And hyphen is definitely not spelled out. It's just the dash between the words.
We get it. It's not the simplest to type in. But we're not exactly seeking the fly by a website reader. Anyhow, our model is pretty simple at The High Route; we will ask for a modest annual subscription fee to access our stories, which if you think about it is a rather old school model. However, our podcast will be free. We will be producing two different podcasts, one more general in nature with stories and interviews. That's the one you're listening to right now. The other will be gear focused and hosted by Wilson Wyoming's Gavin Hess. Stay tuned for that.
The podcast they are not free to produce, edit or store on a server. So if you'd like the podcast, please consider supporting the high route. We'd appreciate it. I won't go into all the details now. But the high route is a group of folks who love the mountains and they include backcountry skiers and climbers who, as I like to say, do the doing. Unlike me, they are in the mountains more often than anywhere else during their annual trips around the Sun.
This all brings us to our first guest on the podcast he is Caley Fretz, editor in chief of Escape Collective Caley is a former editor of Velonews and Cycling Tips, both of which were purchased in the past by the outside Media Group, and eventually either snuffed out or morphed into something else as this thing goes. Long story short Caley is no longer part of that entity. He helped start the independent reader supported Escape Collective, a site dedicated also to cycling. Escape Collective went live in March. And it's an understatement to say Cayle’s vision and risk taking are inspiring to us. Had we not seen Cayle quest into the media landscapes unknown terrain, we're unsure we would have taken the risk ourselves. So thank you, Cayle and the others at Escape Collective. We think this interview helps serve two purposes, we get some insight into how an outdoor media entity begins and evolves. And listeners also learn more about the DNA of the high route. Like we noted, we were inspired by the Escape Collective's values and energy to make a go of it. Thanks for listening and on to podcast episode one.
Caley Fretz: My name is Cayle Fretz, I'm the co-founder. I'm still not really used to that part, co-founder and editor in chief of Escape Collective launched March 1 of this year. Longtime cycling journalist reporter worked for cycling tips and VeloNews back in the day, and yeah, now doing our own thing.
THR: There's been a lot of shake up and movement in the outdoor media sort of landscape space for probably a long time. But really in particular, there's been seismic, notable seismic tremors for maybe four or five years. But I'm curious how you would describe the evolution from your perspective of outdoor media?
Caley: Is it an evolution or a devilish devolution or a slow disintegration or outdoor media is a microcosm, right? It's a microcosm of the sort of issues that all media are struggling with. I mean, you take out like the New York Times, which is very much sort of its own beast. And I would say almost every single media company on the planet is worse off now than they were 10 years ago. And so yeah, outdoor industry outdoor media. falls in that same bucket. And the sort of the ever decreasing value of each individual person in your audience makes it increasingly difficult to build a media company that works. And that can pay all your employees and be in any way profitable and do things that are that a company is supposed to do, right. And so then the quality of the media goes down, because there's less, there's less money and there's less, everyone's just a bit less flush, and makes it harder to be creative and innovative when you don't have any cash. And here we are, sort of getting bundled up and unbundled, and bundled up and unbundled. And it's just been a bad decade, about two decades, probably, but I only have the last decade of personal experience. So
THR: It's probably been bad for a long time, and has been down for a long time. But but there are some glimmers of hope out there that we're gonna get to in a bit. I hate the word content creator, because it just makes me feel like it makes me think like, I'm in the business of making disposable media disposable content, which kind of makes me Yeah, it doesn't sit well with me. But I am curious, how have you seen content in particular, and the content that you were once asked to produce? Say, when you first started out at VeloNews? And I think you were at VeloNews? First way back?
Caley: Yeah, I was an intern there actually way back in like 2010.
THR: Based out of Boulder? Yep.
Caley: Yep.
THR: OK, how have you seen the type of content you were responsible for generating, and how that sort of changed up until you started Escape Collective, which is certainly a different model?
Caley: I have a very different perspective on my early years now than I used to, because I now I guess, I have seen behind the curtain a little bit more. And I've seen the things required to make a media business work. Whereas when I was 22 years old, and starting off at VeloNews. And, you know, I was just sent to a bicycle race. And I was and I was told to make content out of that bicycle race and do reporting and talk to writers and talk to directors and come back with interesting stories. And that was sort of the extent of, of my remit at that point.
And I can't say that I thought that much beyond that other than, you know, okay, well, I'm supposed to write back then, you know, two to five stories a day, for example, from the Tour de France. And how do I do that? How do I find those stories? How do I get them out as quickly and efficiently as possible?
As things sort of progressed, in the last 10 years, I would say, the overarching theme is basically media companies trying to figure out what on earth, people like me, like the reporters should be doing, because they actually didn't know, a lot of the time. Nobody could really figure out how to make any money anymore, right? Do we go for a volume play? Do we need to write as many stories as humanly possible? Do we need to go deeper? Do we need to, you know, drop the quantity and the quality?
And I feel like over the course of my my sort of journalism career, we got pulled back and forth, and back and forth there over and over again, because frankly, like, the people of our heads just weren't sure because it wasn't clear and everyone's just sort of throwing things at the wall and trying to see what would happen. And so, you know, kind of shifted into like, my early VeloNews days, we have said a magazine, the magazine existed up until 18 months ago or so. And, you know, should the internet just be an online version of our magazine? Should it be this big, deep reported pieces that are 3000 words long? Or do we need to shift and try to chase cycling news around and go for the high volume play.
It was just sort of all over the place for the last decade and I don't really fault anybody for that. Like if I had been in the position of my superiors at that point. I think it would have been doing the same thing just again like chucking stuff at the wall because the fundamentally the models were the were what was shifting underneath them and the way that that sort of money came into media was was shifting underneath everybody and everyone was just trying to shift themselves to match right you're chasing things around your your Oh, Facebook, video views are through the roof. Okay, we're pivoting the video. We're making Facebook videos now. Oh, Facebook, video views were total bullshit. And they were lying. I guess we're unpivoting from video and we're going back toward the written word — it was that sort of thing.
For the last decade it has been media companies chasing their tails, trying to figure out where the money was going to come from to pay these people that they had on payroll, you know, to cover the costs of running a business In this space and yeah, unfortunately, that the sort of some of the individuals that probably suffered the most from that were the ones that were just trying to make stuff and trying to make good stuff. And yeah, that's the core of my frustrations over the last decade have all basically come back to that is no one sort of fully explaining why on earth I was doing any of the things that I was being asked to do. And yeah, me, because I had a full time job making stuff, not really having the bandwidth to go figure it upon myself.
THR: I guess behind the scenes a little bit, and looking at metrics was readership, you know, specifically in cycling media, and I'm thinking of like, I'm dating myself, but that huge boom with Lance Armstrong, where it was like, grim, you know, I'm sure my grandmother was watching the tour. Anyway, what were your readership numbers like? Were they fairly steady state?
Caley: So I came in, it was sort of the end of the Lance era actually came at the sort of Lance 2.0. If you recall, when he came back, yeah, that's Sorry, I've covered I've covered a bit of that. And so I wasn't around in kind of 2002 99 or 2005, peak land stuff. My guess is the numbers were actually higher in 2010, than they were earlier. Because the methods of distribution on the internet were better. You know, Facebook was becoming a thing. That was a mean, social media was becoming a means of spreading your content around. Media companies were better understanding Google and SEO and how to use those distribution channels.
And so a big part of those early days was just figuring out how to Yeah, how to use those channels. How do you Facebook to get to get the word out about your Lance Armstrong story that doesn't just go to the same group of people anymore? Yeah. And then and then you end up with this with a situation where suddenly, these algorithms, and we're kind of talking kind of mid mid 2010s, here, 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, right? Not only in the cycling space, but sort of, you can go all the way to BuzzFeed, because suddenly, Facebook in particular, and Google, were sort of this way to put your content in front of this massive group of people that probably didn't have a good way to find you otherwise.
So sort of the discovery mechanism of Facebook and the discovery mechanism of SEO, with this incredibly powerful tool that was used a lot in those 2010s. To take, you know, kind of reasonable viewership numbers and just, you know, 100x, multiply them, right. You know, back in the day, like a good, I think the VeloNews subscriber list for the print product was, was, I think, when I first started, it was like, 30,000, or something like that. 20,000, I can't remember exactly, but it was like in the 10s of 1000s, right. And then you go over to the internet, and all of a sudden, you know, a pageviews number, a monthly pageviews number of less than a couple million was small. And so that the entire, sort of like, this is the wrong use of this term, but like the Overton window of page of audience size shifted, right, and all of a sudden, 30,000, and a print product was was like, well, who wants to talk to 30,000 people when you've got 30 million on this side.
And so it kind of shifted the media attention toward these other distribution methods, again, Google and Facebook and things like that. And these massive, massive numbers that were essentially built off the back of algorithms, controlled by other companies.
At the end of the sort of what basically like since the pandemic, one of the things that has happened is a lot of those algorithms have started to shift. And all these companies realize that they built businesses on the back of somebody else's algorithm that they have no control over. And Buzzfeed News has shut down because they can't get the distribution via Facebook that they used to get. And there's a million examples of this. And so I think that from just a pure numbers perspective, the peak for most media was probably somewhere in the late 2010s, when Facebook was doing its thing, and Google was doing its thing. And if you weren't getting millions and millions of pageviews, you were failing miserably.
Whereas now, getting those sort of like free eyeballs, even if they weren't actually worth very much, they released a big number you could sell. Getting those free eyeballs is getting a lot more difficult, you know, Google searches about it. Change, most likely, AI is about to do things that we can't really predict at this point. Facebook has shut off the firehose, right. Like you cannot get the traffic out of Facebook that you could get three years ago, you absolutely cannot do it, particularly if you're not willing to pay for it. So all these things have kind of shifted. And I think it's going to recenter media around their actual audience size, right, as opposed to just all these kinds of fly-bys that Facebook and Google would provide. And I think what was happening, and what I hope is kind of happening is a lot of media is re centering on the people that actually care about them. As I say, to to the Escape crew on a pretty regular basis, like our job is to build a website that people come to on purpose, not a website that people end up on accidentally, because with our model, people that show up accidentally are probably just gonna leave, and we didn't make a cent off of them. Because we don't monetize those fly-byers. We're looking for people that find us love us, and then stick around, that's a very different, it's a very different model, it's a very good way to think about the content that we're producing.
THR: It becomes kind of at least, the way I took it was kind of this existential question, you know, about the outdoor media landscape. And obviously, the media landscape at large. You know, where there was this real clear shift, a while ago, I suppose, where it was about capturing eyeballs and capturing people's wallets. And, you know, the outdoor industry includes US consumers that spend a ton of money on things like gear. So that's up there, there's, as I noted, there's been a shift in the kind of content or most of the content that's put out there. And there's just a ton of noise.
Caley: So I think I think one of the things Sorry, I just did when we, when we make podcasts, we stick our hand up.
I think one of the things that happened. So what I was just talking about and sort of like this, this peak of numbers right at the end of the 2010s, basically, like just pre pandemic, the peak of the numbers right there, as things started to fall off. And as Facebook's turned off, the firehose of traffic. And as Google got kind of harder to gain. I think one of the things that happened was publishers that didn't understand where they're where their true value, lay, they started pulling out all the stops trying to try to still hit those old numbers, right, which was actually it was a distribution problem. It wasn't a content problem.
And so the content was shifting toward this, like higher volume, you know, basically get worse and worse and worse in an effort to just get more and more eyeballs in lower quality eyeballs, I would argue, but also just lower quality content. And it was basically a reaction to the fact that yeah, they couldn't just, they couldn't just check things on Facebook and get and get hundreds of 1000s people to show up every single month. You know, on one story, I think BuzzFeed at one point was literally doing billions of pageviews. Right? That was off the back. It wasn't off the back of people typing in buzzfeed.com. Right, it was entirely off the back of people coming in via Facebook and Google. And so those algorithms shift and that company is hosed. And that's exactly what ended up happening. But the end result for people on the ground like people like you and me is that we were being asked to try to hit the same numbers as we were hitting before. And kind of the only way to do it was this really high volume, low quality approach. And that became increasingly difficult to swallow, really, difficult to want to go into work and do every day. But the sort of like the macro effects that were causing these micro issues are a real and profound and haven't changed, right, like, but I do think that it's also why you and I are sitting here, both of us either either about to or already have thought through through things a bit differently and are trying to do something that is a better match for today's media landscape. Basically.
THR: That's an interesting question, right? It's like I and I think this is a good transition to like specifically what you're doing at Escape is I keep on sort of my internal dialogue. And this is good for me, because I was like, part of one of the reasons that I wanted to reach out to you is like, I need to flesh this out a little bit. Right? Yeah. So part of my internal dialogue is, has the media landscape changed? It seems like Kaylee's experiment with the Escape Collective and the other folks that you've brought on board, obviously, Wade, James, you know, names that folks recognize from cycling riding has been, it's got legs, and it's got strong legs.
Caley: It's got, I don't know if it has a torso yet, but it's like some legs running around. That's for sure. I don't want to oversell or undersell it. Right? Which is like, you know, media is still really hard. That is the reality, it's a very difficult business. It's you're trying to convince people to pay for something that they haven't paid before, or you're selling them in an ad market that is very poor at the moment.
Either one of those tactics is going to be a difficult place to be. That said, yeah, we were sort of, I guess, not shocked, but very pleased with the sort of reaction upon our launch in March. You know, we don't release we don't release membership numbers publicly. But there's many, many 1000s of people who signed up for annual memberships at first, you know, 100 bucks a pop. Right. And it got us to the point where Yeah, we do, we have legs, we can continue forward. " And, you know, we're not, we're not profitable yet. But we are on a trajectory that points us in that direction. And we think we'll get there before we run out of money. So, yeah, I mean, that's essentially where we are right now. And yeah, again, I don't want to, I don't know, undersell or oversell it, and that and that's not like, I don't think that our model is some kind of silver bullet either. I just think it's fair, I just think it's a better match for what people are looking for right now and a better match for what our whole crew was interested in doing.
And that is a big part of it, as well as just, you know, it's been, it's been kind of, it's been not not a great place to work in media, it for the last like 10 years. Because you just kind of get bounced around and you're getting laid off. And you're you know, it's almost like getting laid off is almost like a rite of passage at this point. Right. It's like, who in this line of work hasn't at least once in the last 1015 years, if you've been at this a while you probably laid off at least once. So it's been kind of a rough place to work. And so building something that is sort of like employee first, and is all about like the whole pitches that we write the things that we want to read, and we find her interesting, that's you almost work backwards from there. And like how do you make model work, while making it an enjoyable place for us to do our thing?
THR: Let’s take a step back just slightly. How would you describe the Escape Collective model?
Caley: Well, at the moment, we are 100%. Membership, and subscription funded media entity. I say membership and subscription, because those two things are different in our heads. And I say at the moment, because frankly, I don't think we will, I think that ads are in our future in some form or another. And that's for a number of reasons. One, you know, I don't think you can grow, at some point you sort of plateau with the number of people that you're going to get to give you cash. And the other thing is that like, I don't think all advertising is just terrible, and is like the end of media. I just think a lot of it is, I think, and I think it mostly comes down to doing it properly and to, you know, not being sort of purposely annoying as part of the advertising strategy. So yeah, at the moment, we're 100% member and subscriber funded.
Our whole thing is, you know, sort of a collection of podcasts, a website with a metered paywall, so you get a certain number of stories free and then at some point, you do have to pay up. And then we're moving into things like email, newsletters, and other ways to reach people where they are, and to provide value to our audience. And that's the model. The model is to provide enough value to the audience that they are willing to give us money. Just like any other product, right, you know, distilled as far as we possibly can. The model is to sell our content to the people actually consuming it, instead of selling the people consuming our content to our advertisers. That's the fundamental model and Um, and we even said, even if we add ad advertising at some point, which I think we probably will, the big deal for us is to kind of keep the ratio between those two revenue streams at a place where we're very comfortable with it. So what we don't ever want to get to is a place where we are advertising reliant, where if we lose, the big advertiser is, you know, potential layoffs for staff or, or other major issues, right, we want to be primarily funded by our audience, and then essentially use advertising revenue to grow and to cover additional areas that we wouldn't have been otherwise been able to cover and just improve the product. That's the that's the essentially the strategy around our various revenue streams at this point,
THR: So my question is, you've seen a lot of different advertising models, right, what feels like a good landing spot for the Escape Collective in terms of advertising,
Caley: I think if we start, I think the absolute cap, and this is just like finger in the air math, right, like back of the napkin math, not the absolute cap. For us, it's probably something in the neighborhood like 15 to 20% of our revenue is advertising. Because that's a nice number to basically like if we can cover our costs with our like, hard costs with memberships and subscription, if we're making an additional 15-20%, that allows us to grow.
So for example, we really want to get sort of hardcore into cross country mountain biking next year. And to do that, we either need to get a whole bunch of new members. But they haven't actually seen the content yet. So it's gonna be a bit difficult. Or we use a bit of advertising funding to sort of get ahead of ourselves and start to produce that content. So that's, that's sort of my like, my rough guess. I don't know exactly where those numbers will end up. And again, at the moment, it's 100%, and zero. So we're going to start really, really small. I have seen a lot of advertising models over the years.
And I'm certainly not, like, I'm not a sales guy. I'm not. That's the other reason why we're not doing advertising right now, is we literally don't have a salesperson. So yeah, I think that the thing that we will avoid is ads that are annoying, like, buy big, flashy banner ads, things that stick on your page, all that stuff is just, it makes the user experience an absolute nightmare. You know, I don't want to I don't want to mention any of our sort of cycling world competitors directly. But I think anybody who consumes a lot of cycling media will know exactly who I'm talking about.
It's like there's a lot of sites you open up and particularly on a phone, which is where 70 plus percent of people are currently reading. There's just like a dime size space for the actual content you're reading. And everything else is just flashy ads and videos that stick and when you're scrolling and all this sort of like annoying stuff, because essentially, the publishers have kind of had to do that to make enough cash to keep the thing afloat. We don't want to go anywhere near that, like, I absolutely hate that sort of thing. The user experience is terrible. So I think when we do ads, it'll be things like, we'll work them into our podcasts, we will work them into potentially, like email newsletters will will will do them in ways where, you know, I think that they'll provide a lot of value for the advertiser, but they also won't, the point won't be to like annoy the end user, the reader the audience into like, accidentally clicking on something or, or having to get something out of the way to actually read their story. There's so much room in between the kind of like, hyper annoying ad model and the no ads at all model to play in that I'm not really that worried about the I'm not really worried about finding the line there for us, because at the end of the day, we're going to, we're going to make sure that we still it's still product that we would want to consume. So yeah, not too worried about that one.
THR: The whole idea of getting a person who you don't have a relationship with per se, right there were like the Cycling Tip devotees or the Cayle devotees, right? Which is awesome. You guys had a very solid product, but a person that you're trying to get to, to subscribe and they are 100% Not used to subscribing for much. I mean, I always ask people, What do you read? And then more specifically, what do you subscribe to because it gives me some insight into their consumer choices, what they are, what they are not willing to pay for. But I'm curious from your perspective, like what is that conversation been like? for you, or do you even engage in the conversation of like, Hey, if you believe in our product, or any product that's written, for example, you should probably pay for it.
Caley: Yeah. So we actually recently did a reader survey and support for independent media was was a pretty strong it was a large reason why people have signed up to, to Escape, is they like the idea of, of putting their money into something that is working for them, basically, because that's what we're doing, like, you work for whoever pays you. Right. And and, and that's the sort of fundamental reality of a lot of sort of the media world is, you know, if the bike industry pays you, end of the day, you work for the bike industry, you might you might tell yourself that you worked for readers, I mean, we always did it cycling tips, I think we did a pretty good job of sort of toeing that line.
But at the end of the day, when the shoe really drops, you have one boss, right? And it's and it's whoever's keeping your lights on. And for us, that's the audience. And that is massively massively freeing. And they know that and so having that conversation with people is actually quite easy, because that's something that people understand I think immediately is the fact that, okay, if I give you, if I give you my $100, like, you kind of work for me, you work for 1000s and 1000s, of other people too. So it's not like I can just come in and demand that I want a story about something, you know, we're going to work for what the majority of audiences is looking for. But at the end of the day, that sort of consumer sentiment was really what guides our whole sort of content strategy and editorial product. And that's a pitch that makes sense to people.
So I think it makes sense to readers. Yeah, it works, it works quite well, we use that pitch, I think most often probably in our podcasts, basically saying, our podcasts are all free, for example, there's no paywall, we'll probably add kind of special episodes, paywalled episodes down the line, but the moment everything is free, and, you know, it's it's almost like an NPR model, you know, if you like this support, it kind of thing. And that works incredibly well, like a massive portion of our total membership identified podcasts, which again, are they can get for free, as the primary reason for them to sign up. Actually, almost more than the website content, which is fascinating. And again, there's no, we haven't forced any of those people to sign up, they could get the podcast for free, whether they pay or not. But they choose to pay because they understand that if they like this product, and they want it to continue to exist, they need to pony up. So it's not a hard pitch, there's a certain segment of people who will never do it, who will never hit purchase. Right. And we know that and that, that that is sort of one of the fundamental difficulties of the model. But there are also a lot of people out there who are willing to do so and sort of understand and appreciate their role in this sort of ecosystem. Right?
THR: It's an interesting question, because it also speaks to the sort of who you are working for? And in the past models I've worked for, you know, there's been advertising or there's been an owner who then could drive affiliate links to their particular place selling goods, but I honestly never felt like, oh, I owe anybody anything. And there, I felt very lucky that there was no overt pressure to review this or give this a thumbs up. So how do you navigate that now with companies with which you obviously need to get products from? You know, paying for a bike to test. If you're purchasing it could be I've listened to your podcast, you know, and I think one of you was like, yeah, it's not that expensive. It's $5,000. I was like, that's the bike industry, right? Like things are pricing. But um, yeah, yeah. How do you guys navigate that? And I suppose maybe that's a question for James. But, you know,
Caley: Yeah, yeah. I don't think, I can only think of one example at the moment where we've not been invited to some launches recently. And I don't really know why. Like, other than, other than we were honest about some things and there's maybe a bit of a relationship breakdown there. But you know, those relationships are important to us, too. We have no interest in it just like shitting all over the bike industry left, right and center. They make pretty good stuff most of the time and we're happy to talk about it and yeah, then providing a product is a huge deal. It's very important to us. You know, it's not some, it's not some nefarious thing, right?
Sort of return back to, to the model thing. And like, I felt the same way at segments, which is that we very, very rarely got any sort of significant amount of, you know, you need to be nice to XYZ brand kind of thing, it was very rare. And generally, we were able to push back on it and not do whatever we wanted anyway. But that tension still existed for sure, that tension is now gone. And I would say that most of the industry, I'm particularly when we first launched, like, I heard from all sorts of corners of the industry, people were very happy with what we were doing and very supportive of it. A lot of the industry is just not really sure how to deal with us, like, I had a lot of conversations with PR people and marketing people being like, so what do we do with you now? Like, if we're not going to do ads? Like how do we get into Escape Collective and like, well, you, you pitch us on the on the on the product? And if the tech team wants to deal with it, then they will deal with it. And, and that's basically the extent of it.
And so I think that, you know, we haven't had any sort of real issues with the industry in any way. And I would hope that that continues, because, yeah, there's a huge amount of mutual respect there. And yeah, they've certainly lost a bit of leverage against us. But that's the whole point. That's the whole point of the model. So, you know, I'm sort of willing to take that, and I think that the companies that are ruining the loss of that leverage are probably not ones that we wanted to deal with all that much anyway, right. Like, if they don't get what we're doing, and they don't get the importance of it, to the people that they're trying to sell bikes to, then I'm not sure how I can get that across at this point. But like, I think it's, it's quite self explanatory.
I think that, you know, having an entity in cycling that is quite obviously not beholden to anybody, but a consumer is a good thing. And I think if you're, if you're a company that is proud of your product, and stands behind your product, you should probably be excited about that. Because if we say good things, it's like a Consumer Reports thing. If we say good things about your product, there is no question that that comes from a place of absolute honesty. And the reality, even though you and I are both sitting here saying, well, wait, you know, we didn't get that much pressure when we were working under ad models.
The reality in the bike industry is that that pressure does exist. Most I would say elsewhere. And regardless of what's actually happening behind the scenes, there is a massive perception problem with the audience. huge portions of the audience of cycling fans, people, people reading cycling reviews, bike reviews, don't trust what the media is telling them, there's a reason for that. It's because they've been lied to a bunch of different times. And it doesn't take many times for it does take many lies before that trust is essentially broken down and takes a really long time to build again.
So if I was a bike brand, I would be, I think, pleased to have a media entity that was starting from a different place and for whom there was no, there were no questions of trust, right? We're trying to rebuild trust that has been broken over the last 20 years by, you know, unscrupulous media titles, editorial and selling reviews, and like these things do happen. And whether or not you and I ever had to deal with that is largely irrelevant, because the audience believes that they happen. And as a result, questions everything. Yeah, I kind of went on a bit of a tangent there. But I think that that's, that's how I feel. That's how I feel about this sort of the relationship between us in the industry is that I hope they understand that if we are successful, it's good for them.
That's the yes, you can't get you can't dangle half a million dollars in front of my face anymore. And hope that I'll that I'll review all of your bikes, but if your bikes are good, we're going to review your bikes. And hopefully the audience will understand enough about the way that we do things that they will know that those reviews are valid. That combined with the sort of long history that Dave Rome and James have, and the incredible, sort of like his reputation that Ronan has built for himself in a very short amount of time. I think that those things in combination make for a pretty, pretty powerful sort of tech department. And yeah, like that's, that can only be good for, for anybody making good products.
THR: It's like, yeah, it's like, it shouldn't be a breath of fresh air, but it's like oh, Oh, Okay, last question. Relationship at Escape Collective with “best of.”
Caley: Hmm, we've talked about this internally a little bit. I mean, okay, so you pull back the curtain a little bit, right? So, one of the things that I think every single sales director I have ever worked with has asked for is the end of year, like awards. Right? That isn't to say that we don't, from an editorial perspective, also think awards are great, we like giving out awards, like it's one, it's kind of fun to do, too. It can often be great content. Like it's it can be entertaining, particularly, it's really opinionated.
But we often do these things via podcast, for example. Those can be great shows where we were doing awards. Now, the sort of sales director version of this is none of the No, I want, like, the top 10 somethings in XYZ category. Because every single time you mention one of those brands, we're gonna go to them, and we're going to try to sell, right? So I don't have that anymore. I don't have a sales director.
First and foremost, I don't have anybody asking me for best of lists. We don't do affiliate. And so I would say a huge portion of best off lists these days are just affiliate lists. Now, depending on the title, those are either total bullshit, and are literally just a list of links that make the company money, or they're real. And the problem is, if you make the real ones, the audience has very little way of telling the difference. And so you're kind of dragged down by the bullshit ones, right? We don't do affiliate we don't. So we don't have any sort of financial reason to do best off list. We don't, we don't have any, the only reason we would have to do best of lists is if we think it's really good content. And we probably will like we'll probably get to the end of the year. And we'll probably do a bunch of awards. And part of that is because we're all going to go on vacation over Christmas. And we need some content to put up that week. And awards are great for that particular type of thing. But the reason won't be because we need to, we need to squeeze XYZ bike brand in, in the middle of sales season. So that's nice. I don't, I don't miss that.
THR: Yeah, and the underlying vibe, there is less, for me at least a little less cynical, and less SEO driven than like, Hey, here's some stuff that we believe in. We liked Yeah.
Caley: I mean, like, so it's like to be blunt, like SEO is not that important to us. And social isn't that important to us? One because social distribution is broken. Facebook doesn't help anymore, too, because SEO is probably about to shift dramatically. And three, because like I said, fly-bys people that show up on a bestseller list and read it once and never come back. Those people are not useful to me, they're never going to give me $100 to read that one thing. So yeah, we don't have our only SEO concerns are just sort of, like, overall growth. How do we pull in? How do we, how do we help people find us that might be really into what we're doing. And from that perspective, yeah, it's still important. But like the SEO of an individual piece of content, making sure that it ranks really high, so that we can get affiliate links high up in a Google response to make point 0.2 cents off of every single one of the people that come across, that's not something we do.
So it's not something we have to worry about. Which again, is kind of freeing, the best, the best thing about the model that we have chosen is how freeing it is from an editorial perspective, that's just that it comes back basically back down to that. And I think that that makes for better content, which means that we have a higher likelihood of being able to sell that content to our actual consumers, which are the audience. So it's a nice little thing. It's a nice little 360. It works. It works in lots of different ways.
THR: And where can folks find you?
Caley: Escape Collective.com You can throw a slash join in there if you just want to sign right up. Yeah, we've got we've got you know, we got monthly billing, we can do annual billing, we have two different tiers. One is a membership tier, so that gets you access to a private discord, where you can go ask questions of James and Dave Rome, and you can talk about bike racing, you can chat about the podcasts and things like that. And then there's a second tier that is just called a reader. And that basically just drops the paywall on the site. So if all you do is you want to read stuff on the site every once in a while that's a bit cheaper. You can just drop the payload with that reader version. Yeah, head on over. We're doing our best to make stuff that people like , that's the task every single day.