That seems to corroborate my perception they're a bit lost on where to go from here. :)

Been covered a couple of times already, but not sure if you read those posts. They have given / sold large amounts of data to quite a few cities. However, the $ they get for this is absolutely peanuts compared to what you may think they get for that data. Even if they did sell data to 500 cities a year for US10,000 a time that's 5 million [editted] revenue per year which doesn't cover the cost of selling that data - (think about it they need to have legal and financial arrangements specific to every country they do work in, and as these are public sector clients then there is minimal flexibility on behalf of the customers). And whilst some on here may consider that cycle data is an essential part of planning / running a city, 98% of ratepayers don't - they think cyclists should be funding infrastructure from bike permits/tax not car drivers.

It may be that the three stages of their business plan were 1) build users and VC like facebook 2) sell data / advertising (data wasn't really as valuable as they hoped, everyone spat the dummy at the way they added advertising or 'promoted content'), so now they are suggesting people that use their service pay for it.Having demonstrated that there was a percentage of people that have been paying for essentially negligible reason / benefit for the last 8 years, then faced with the option now to not use the main core feature of the service a proportion of people will now pay what is a relatively small cost, a larger proportion will just miss out on the feature and carry on auto-uploading, and a proportion will disconnect. But that still increases revenue. In some ways the cost they are charging is an awkward one. It's a charge which means that people are upset at something that was free no longer is. They would feel that way if the cost was $1, $5 or $50 a month, it's simply because it's a cost. However, the 5 means they need a lot of people to pay, you can't count on a small number of core users funding it for everyone. And the reality is that the 'principled objectors' are the most vocal. People that are "meh, I got 8 years free as an introductory offer, now it's the cost of a coffee a fortnight" are a lot less likely to post on social media than the "How dare they charge me for looking after my data for me" group.

I know I always judge my subscription costs in coffees/fortnight....

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

Check your math

Please tell me what Strava does better than Garmin or Polar's native software.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

LOL. Indeed. I knew it was wrong. i blame the 4:40am zwift.... Point stands though, $5m is still nowhere near the revenue to support what they do when you include the cost of selling that broadly.

DC Rainmaker says that Strava says that the changes will roll out to end users over the next couple of days...

Lets me fake brag to my clubbies. Lets me seamlessly post photos of my ride. See data from all the group, regardless of their device. See exactly where on a long climb I'm gaining / losing time compared to others. On a weekly basis then lets me see how my times compare on the key group ride climbs with those in the other groups (we split up to keep numbers safe, have several 'free ride' segments and always interesting to see how much difference between the people in other groups. So for me the #1 difference is the segments. I don't use Strava for any other training reasons, that's Training Peaks and sometimes WKO4. Garmin, errm. Umm. That's simply a place that is a passing point to get data into TP and Strava. TP for serious, Strava for fun.

These changes have been rolled out for a couple weeks it feels like.


I don't use it for any of these group ride things, probably because I train solo. I do agree when it comes to races and you see the other people that ran it.

Garmin has segments and it also has similar features to what you just described. It's just not what Garmin build their platform on. My point is that people aren't on strava for data analysis.

The one kind of cool feature that I like, that I'm sure could be an easy roll out from Garmin is the matched runs feature when you look at your data from a specific training session.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

I recognize there is a revenue stream through the data but obviously Strava is tired of rowing that boat hoping for an eventual pay out. All of your above mentioned companies make huge money from ads and that just hasn't happened for Strava either by strategy or by lack of upside. At some point you have to make money and that time is now for Strava. And even if they do lose 30% of total users which I very much doubt there is still plenty of data to go around.

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Professional Athlete: http://jordancheyne.wordpress.com/ http://www.strava.com/athletes/145340

Coaching Services:http://www.peakformcoaching.com/

It takes a lot of people to ignore bugs and feature requests for years, and then announce that an option for a chronological feed is an enhancement, after previously changing from chronological order.

IMO at least, I am reluctant to spend for Strava not because the product doesn't have value (although I think they overcharge for it - at 1$ to 3$ per month it'd be nobrainer), but because I think that management doesn't listen to consumers in the least. That is a turn off.

It's pretty annoying though when you have to do that in the first place...especially from "Professional" members, who should know enough to not just upload them as regular rides...and then when called on it, say "Yeah, it was motorpaced...flag it if it bothers you". Totally tone deaf. (True story about a pro who trains locally often)

Same thing with e-bikes. There's a separate category for that, yet somehow users don't understand that it's even possible to set the activity up properly :-/

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http://bikeblather.blogspot.com/

// the pay wall helps to remember that a certain speed on a real road takes place in a special situation at a certain time .. to be compared in that special situation .. [that comparison can't be "bought by better conditions“]

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*
___/\___/\___/\___ the s u r f b o a r d of the K u r p f a l z is the r o a d b i k e .. oSo >>

Nothing in life is free, other than air.

If you want the features, go pay. And when you pay, you can complain about what is missing.

Been saying that for 2 days already. Seems Strava management doesn’t have their mission clear. Or have the wrong mission

wish they had thought outside the box a little before this. we did a virtual club race using strava this april because all other racing was cancelled. we had 4 local segments chosen. Road, MTB , gravel, and enduro. you could use any bike you wanted, on any day within roughly a week. then final leaderboard positions were translated to points system and a winner decided. 100 people in the club, probably 25 did all 4 segments. i would gladly pay a couple of $ for something like this. obviously at a small level, everyone knew everyone else and cheating was not an issue.
so why not create a virtual race or event portion of the app with a small entry fee, and polish up the features to make a private leaderboard with just race entrants. they could have cleaned up the last 2 months......

Strava is great. I adds a dimension missings when racing is sparse. Expanded features begin to challenge the data value from training peaks. Its also the best log of activities i have known for the last decade. Where else can you easily pull up the same run and see all your efforts over the past years. Its monthly charge is nominal. I have always seen the charge as a good faith contribution to a website which provides a great platform. Almost like Kahn Academy. How many of you use this for your kids and dont contribute to it financially. All our local club rides are passionately bridled around strava segments making for saucy spicy rides. Not sure what the big deal is. There site is not littered with add banners and obnoxious advertising.

Yeah, I had an interaction like that with Phil Gaimon. He was doing a Facebook poll about whether or not to motorpace one of his KOM attempts. I told him very politely that he shouldn't because it was explicitly against Strava's policy. He completely ignored me and kept going with the poll. (Though the end result was not to motorpace).

As I stated, I was not aware of their financial infrastructure. I haven't really read up on Strava since the very early days when data was a big part of their plan. The money from data certainly seems nice though, I'll take that in cash or check any day.

Do you happen to know how many paying subscribers they currently have on the platform?

I never really understood subscribing to Strava and after this move I still don't have any need to subscribe. I haven't sniffed a top 100 in Boulder, so I'm definetly not in the running for any leaderboards.

Does this decision by Strava open the door for one of the other platforms to take some market share by weekending their platforms?

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Team Zoot 2023

It's currently uninsurable. As soon as Strava (or anyone) collects an entry fee for a virtual race conducted outside, they have liability. I have been talking to some RDs, who are looking at trying to put on some virtual events this year and they are trying to find someone to write an acceptable insurance product. It hasn't been that difficult for virtual running events, but what one RD has told me the cycling is a higher liability and right now nobody would provide a product that had a large window (like say a whole week).

This will get worked out, but even putting on a virtual race is not simple and each individual event would have to be insured separately. For a regular race, the liability is confined to a relatively small time window and the risk can be mitigated by controls the RD can enforce. For a virtual race, there is no way to put any mitigations in place and there is a much longer exposure time. I imagine it is a kind of challenging product to develop, just because of the unknowns, so to the extent insurers were willing to offer it, I assume they would price it at a premium until they had some historical information about the expected losses.

If anyone ever got a job out of a Harvard alumni connection, it provided a product to an end-user; therefore de-facto it is an end-user product.

And again, I enjoy the irony in your observations. Facebook was originally a "Harvard student network" and you are trying to claim the social network (because a social network is comprised of people and relationships; any software that may be used to communicate is just a tool, it is not the actual network) comprised of Harvard Alumni (which predates FB by hundreds of years) is not a social network.

Just out of curiousity, do you have a degree in computer science or mathematics (Graph theory) or did you stay at a Holiday Inn last night and get overconfident?

Noting this is a predominantly USA forum, then I'll just add a side comment that down here in the land of no claims (New Zealand - where we have a national accident compensation system that negates any compensation claims) the opposite has happened. I'm being bombarded with 'virtual race' emails which I admit is a total mystery. Every organiser is asking me to pay $20 to enter a 'race' where I go out on my own do my own thing, and then they post me a medal.

But, surely the Ironman Virtual Races that had a mix of indoor and outdoor (including the hill descents) had that liability issue. And they are the most USA of corporations I can think of outside of Ford and CocaCola.

That's your takeaway on my post?

I think this is in interesting comment from reddit
I'm not a big Strava user so I really don't have an opinion either way.




level 1
PositiveCurrent6
55 points
·
2 hours ago
I'll copy paste my rant to a friend over it which gives more than my 2 cents.

In my opinion .... nothing has changed in basicly 10 years... they've totally failed to innovate or develop new features ... i mean becon, route builder ... that's it. They've totally neglected masses of forms of income. they've got a platform which they could use for advertising and sales shamelessly and i bet people wouldn't even care. They have data on which running shoes you have. Cool, track how long before they're fucked. Sell that data for 10000 people back to the manufacturer so they can continually improve their shoe designs. You send me an email saying "yo dawg your shoes are knackered" "oh cool. Want to sell me some new ones? no? ok fine" But they can't even do that because they collect the information in free text because they're morons... Same with tyres etc etc. You have a service due on your bike, check out these bike mechanics in your area.

Oh what's that? you have a new race in the calendar. Have a training plan, we'll sell you that.

They have the ability to collect data on, activity, exercise, purchases, nutrition, kit, wear times, injuries " We've noticed you havn't exercised lately, are you injured? can we reccomend you PTs, Physios? how about a rehab training course focusing on XYZ and the other" There's so damn fucking much they can do with it .... but they're fools.

They've got the opportunity to be the google of exercise. instead they're cutting off their supply of money (Data) and killing the only aspect which keeps the platform running and that's it being a social network. because even if i pay for it ... a load of people wont and will stop using it. so the social aspect will be gone and it'll die.