Everything still works for me and I just looked at a leaderboard for a segment and its held by an old co-worker who rides and e-bike. Pretty funny.

The only thing I care about is seeing what cool rides my friends did. Keeping tabs on people. Oh, you did that race, how did it go, etc? That's still free, apparently, so I'm good.

I cared about segments for a while, KOMs, PRs, etc. But I pay zero attention to those now. I remember 4-5 years ago amongst my roadie community there was a lot of "segment talk," who has the KOM for that climb...where's the finish line for that segment, etc. That seems to be gone. No one talks about that stuff anymore (at least in my perception).

I don't think you read the article. Segments are not behind a paywall, what is behind the paywall is segment rankings outside of the top 10. So you can still see the segments and the KOM, and the top 10, but you can't see anyones rankings (including your own) who are below the top 10 without paying. Seems quite reasonable, there is no "public interest" in knowing who is 1247th place on a segment; if somebody wants to know this obscure information it seems completely reasonable that they should pay.

Why should Strava be concerned about "customers" who don't pay for their service?

As a paying member, I have no opinion on this decision, because I had decided what they were already offering was worth it to me (I gain or lose nothing). So I don't think this decision will cause them to lose any paying customers, and even if it gains 10-20% of people who weren't paying to now join, it was a great business decision.

Strava has been losing money for close to a decade. So it's pretty obvious, having a hugely successful, mostly free service is not a good business. So it is pretty unlikely you are going to see a "free alternative" that offers anything near what Strava did, because nobody will be willing to fund it. Because although Strava was "free" for you, somebody has been paying to keep them in business for the past 10 years.

Apologies for teaching to suck eggs, but you can 'fix' that now using the 'hide segment'. And it's pretty clever, where if several people manually hide a segment then it autohides for everyone, unless you manually go into the 'hidden segments' list and add it back. Although I fully accept this in part may also be geography dependent, and in major cities then I can imagine the number of users is so high on any given path that the 2% of numpties that make crap segments becomes a massive amount of junk.

Because subscriptions are only part of the revenue stream. The other part of the revenue stream is getting eyeballs on and participation in sponsored challenges, and other sponsored things. The more people who sign up for the Rapha Rising challenge or whatever, the higher the rate Strava can demand from sponsors like Rapha. If people start drifting off into Garmin Connect, Trainerroad, Endomondo, etc, it's a problem.

I think in Strava's perfect world they'd be free for the end-user and would just get big checks from all the equipment manufacturers to get access to the Strava user base.

But that perfect world doesn't seem to be working out.

But Strava can't just cater only to the paying subscribers. They need to keep everyone coming back.

How about on the phone app? I don't notice any difference on the desktop but the phone app seems a little crippled. I don't normally look at my rides on the phone so can't tell if it's changed.

The core feature of their platform, is how they monetize it. You were using it, so you consider it has value, but yet you weren't willing to give them any money (definition of a freeloader). Now you sound butthurt, like they owed you or anyone else something. You might consider being grateful about what they provided to you and millions of others for years, while asking for nothing in exchange. They didn't take anything away from you, just after years of getting nothing out of the relationship with you they stopped giving.

What services are you willing to provide to millions of people for free?

I did, actually. I chose a short topic title that captured most of the effect of the change. You're angling towards the leaderboard, but perhaps more importantly in a general sense is that segment analysis is also affected. Want to see your effort for that climb segment? Power over the course of that TT lap? Pay.

I dunno, subscriptions is how Costco makes about 95% of their profits. And companies are still competing to get into their stores. It seems pretty obvious they wouldn't be doing this if their ad revenue was anywhere near sufficient to make the margins their investors expected. Likewise, customers who actually pay for Strava are probably more valuable for the advertisers, because we aren't freeloading cheapskates who are afraid to spend our money;)

I am puzzled about why people are getting so butthurt because somebody stopped giving them something for free. At least me, and most of the people I interact with on Strava all have had the premium service for years. I think it has a not of nice features and I felt good about chipping in to help make this work for everyone. Apparently my donations weren't enough;)

This isn't true. Strava collects and monetizes data uploaded by all users. For example, they sell runner and bike usage stats to city planners, etc. It's similar to Facebook. Strava also sells access to user eyeballs to manufacturers. No end user pays for Facebook, yet users aren't freeloading. Just the opposite. Their data is monetized.

Strava just hasn't figured out a way to monetize that gives the necessary ROI to keep their business growing. (and pay off the venture capital money funnel).

Why do you think that should be free? You should start a free service to provide that, I hear there is an underserved market;)

Just because it's kind of a bait and switch. When you had something for "free" and then it's taken away with no warning, you feel like you've lost something.

I'm not butthurt, though. As I wrote above, segment information has no value to me, so I didn't lose anything.

You must be new to the idea of Data being currency. I, and millions of users worldwide are paying for the service of strava which they have monetized with ads [challenges]. So I have already paid them. What they're now doing is giving customers very little in return for the amount of data we're giving them.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

No, you are just over-estimating the value of the data. We are starting to see an inflection point in businesses whose primary asset is user data. Some of this data is extremely valuable and has allowed these companies (like FB and Amazon) to make huge profits. However, a lot of this data has minimal value (but it is still expensive to extract and maintain). You are portraying this as Strava doesn't know what it's doing, where I think they finally had a come to Jesus moment about what the prospects are for growing the monetization of the data, the growth isn't there and they need to increase the subscription revenue to have a functioning business.

There is a lot of self-importance among triathletes and cyclists that might drive them to think that data about what they are doing is highly valuable, but that fact is the only people who ascribe high value to this data are the athletes themselves, so it is perfectly natural to target this group to get revenue from as opposed to look for third parties (like city planners). Who do you think has more money, road and triathlon cyclists or city planners?

I didn't assert what it should be, just wanted to highlight something that was buried a bit deeper in the article. That's the way it is now following these updates. It's something I'm willing to pay for (and will continue to pay for), but generally premium subscriptions are built out of new feature development, not by restricting existing free features--especially one that is so core to the platform's identity. In my experience Strava's uniquely positioned as a social focal point of otherwise disparate activity/device ecosystems. Instead of continuing to build on that advantage and reinforce that single-stop identity by adding in features present on other platforms--or even just their own community's backlog of requests--they've had to resort to this.

I totally get it from a business standpoint--if you're in a place where you have to make a significant positive impact to your bottom line, this is perhaps the simplest, most immediate way of doing it. I just wish that it hadn't come to this. They could have easily focused on improving the feature set of their platform over the past few years instead of being complacent.

I'm a data scientist. You have an unrealistic estimation of how important you (and information about your sports habits) are and how much anyone wants to pay for it. It's true, data is currency, but in data (like real currency) there are US dollars and Zimbabwe dollars, your cycling information is valued in Zimbabwe dollars;)

And you have to admit there is a certain irony, you are claiming that Strava data is valuable, but when asked to pay for it (because the premium package just gives you access to more data), you have a problem. You can't have it both ways.

Strava has always been an analytics service. All that has happened is they stopped offering as much free analytics. Unlike many businesses who collect a lot of user data, Strava actually shared almost all of it, mostly completely publicly (free).

Agreed on this- there is a lot of segment cluster-F for sure. Also a reason to not have "live" segments on your garmin or whatever- the thing beeps continuously then.

Yeah, for example when I lived and ran in downtown Portland. It’s dumb the amount segments and duplicate segments there are. Hiding segments doesn’t fix the underlying issue. In addition to what you mention above, the other issue is some people may hide version A of a segment, some hide version B and some version C. So none fall below the threshold and all are shown. Not a deal breaker or anything, just annoying

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Matt

+1.

And the 'selling of data to city planners' part is for once where a discussion comes into my dayjob. You are right that strava is selling this. And many are buying the data, or at least using it for some purposes. But, and again, this is my dayjob, it's poor quality data that is biased (as in doesn't reflect the population equally) and of a relatively low resolution (by the time I get my mitts on it) compared to other sources I have for that data. And so bizarrely I'm much happier to pay strava $60 a year for my data than I am to approve / suggest a client of mine pays strava for a city/years worth of data. There are many people playing in this data space, mobile phones (ie the service providers using the data from cell towers to locate people), google of course, TomTom Sat Nav, etc etc. All can give me information about how and where people are moving from a very large database. All have limitations/ advantages. Strava has the greatest certainty on mode. TomTom data best for travel time. Mobile phone is best for 'volume/number' of people and understanding journey purpose.

But none as of yet compete with the more established methods we've been using since the 1960s which are more labour intensive. Sadly the availability of these new sources has in part been hampered by the sellers claiming that they can replicate the data from traditional methods cheaper. This isn't the case most of the time. What they are only just starting to do is to identify the uses of the data we've never tried to do before as it would be impossible. So up to now they have generally been solutions (not) looking for a problem to solve. Which has meant they've been racign to the bottom in terms of the price, but then I've ended up being lumbered with data that has needed significant manipulation/cleaning in order to make it vaguely fit for purpose, and so all up the clients have been sold a dream and ended up with a nightmare.

q

Or the alternative take...
'Hey freeloaders... there's 4 times as many of you now than 6 months ago our computing infrastructure costs a lot, more of it costs more still, and advertising income around the world has crashed. You can't keep dining for free'

Being a data scientist and understanding how one might effectively and profitably monetize a data set are not the same thing...

I am a paying member already and I am distressed by this news. I use Strava mainly as a social network - a way to see what my friends and/or competitors are doing. I am often interested in comparing my segment performances to others'.

If a many of these users stop using Strava because of this move, I'm going to stop using Strava too.

I could care less about detailed analytics of my own ride. I use TP for that.

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Ed O'Malley
www.VeloVetta.com
Founder of VeloVetta Cycling Shoes
Instagram • Facebook

I think Nike has been relatively successful as weathering this pandemic partly by monetizing the workout data collected through its running & training apps. I am sure they and other sports product companies would love to have Strava's data.

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808 > NYC > PDX > YVR
2024 Races: Taupo

idk man, I think the added challenge is having to run the tilikum-steel waterfront loop two times as fast as you can in order to get the 5,000 segments from each different starting point. And then do it all backwards for the other 3,000 segments in reverse.

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808 > NYC > PDX > YVR
2024 Races: Taupo