Insiders Say Outdoor Media Is Dead, But Do Readers Agree?

In early 2021, something of a soft coup occurred at Outside, the venerable, legendary magazine that had begun life decades earlier not as the lofty thought incubator for the rising outdoor subculture it would become, but as another arrow in Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner’s growing quiver of titles.

Long since owned and fostered by Mariah Magazine founder Larry Burke, the Santa Fe-based Outside was but one of many acquisitions made by a mysterious and fledgling outfit then known as Pocket Outdoor Media. Amongst others, SF Gate reported that the purchase was “part of Pocket’s dizzying consolidation of outdoors media outlets.” CEO Robin Thurston had gone on a spree, acquiring nearly two dozen titles over the preceding few years.

And Outside’s prestige and branding would be pressed into the service of the new consortium. “With the move, Pocket Outdoor Media will rebrand to Outside,” the SF Gate article continued.

The fast-paced, $150 million expansion enabled by a Series B funding from Sequoia Heritage came with a certain appeal from Thurston. “What has been missing from the healthy lifestyle category or the active lifestyle category is what I would call the true definitive home of this person,” he opined to Alejandro Cremades on the Dealmakers podcast in the summer of 2021, eliciting a one-stop, digital model. That ideal seemed to drive Thuston to acquire disparate entities, like mapping app GaiaGPS, outdoor event registration sites, and a slew of media titles. “Where do they go every day, not just to find inspiration and training and things like that, but where do they go to take action to register for the next event or where they’re going to travel to next, or what gear they’re going to buy?” Thurston continued. “There wasn’t just one place where all of those things came together.” Thurston spoke in broad, ambitious strokes. He even audaciously hoped that Outside could garner twenty-million subscribers in just five years.

But any luster shining on Thurston’s vision for Outside Inc. would quickly fade as opposition to his slash-and-burn approach to outdoor media grew, becoming a rallying cry for those who saw digitization and consolidation as an existential threat to the culture’s written form.

Murmurs rose in 2022 when Outside Inc. cut 15% of its staff, discontinued several recently acquired print and online entities, and reduced existing magazines’ print cadence. The firm continued acquiring other outdoor companies (many non-media, including Inntopia, a travel-booking software firm), only to further lay off twenty employees in February of 2025, including many on the editorial staff. Anti-Outside furor began to build, culminating weeks later when thirty-five former contributors signed a letter to Thurston demanding that their names be removed from Outside’s masthead, while also disparaging the company for “undue strain on the hardworking staff that remain” and “the company’s leadership asking editors to refrain from investigative journalism and political coverage.”

The outdoor world seemed to cry out all at once that Outside, long the anchoring platform for much of the culture, had gone astray. Outdoor media luminaries decried Thurston’s gutting of titles, while former contributors anonymously spilled to bloggers and writers what was happening on the inside. It was all fodder for a broad discussion on the demise of the outdoor culture’s written form; something Outside’s fall seemed to embody almost poetically.

Writing of the chaos then ensuing at the company, Caley Fretz–formerly employed at the Outside-acquired CyclingTips before co-founding the cycling news site Escape Collective–noted that venture capital and private equity-backed firms like Outside Inc. had come to the fore, hoping to find success scaling legacy titles. “But their strategies of rapid expansion, cost-cutting, and a relentless pursuit of scale often left the core product weakened. By that I mean the content sucked,” Fretz wrote. “Which is what happens when you remove all the people making it.”

Outside’s fall had become a core topic amongst the cognoscenti in outdoor media; an archetypal story of where business had run afoul of core culture. But one stakeholder’s stance remained a mystery. How did outdoor readers actually feel?

It’s become both a mantle carried with the most high-minded regard and a refrain that at times seems never-ending; that at the hands of consolidation, affiliate marketing revenue models, and lowly content–all at the behest of gargantuan parent companies–outdoor enthusiasts have lost the very fabric of their subculture. Outdoor writing in its previous, mostly print-bound and thoughtful form, has all but died. And what’s left–digitized, conglomerate-run, oversaturated, and rife with heavy-churn models–pales in comparison.

Though existential in nature, the topic has become something of a rote theme in outdoor media; a metacognitive if heavily trodden cause célèbre. From the very public proclamations of Outside’s demise to analyses of this very publication, article after article has rung the death knell of outdoor media. In an essay that ran in the lofty digital pages of The New Yorker, former Outside contributor Rachel Monroe explored the matter deeply, her article's title claiming that “The Decline of Outside Magazine Is Also The End of a Vision of The American West.” Even the term Outside refugee has entered the outdoor lexicon, denoting former employees who have taken to the greener pastures of independent, audience-facing publications since fleeing or being fired from the megalith.

POWDER Magazine, which for years had been subject to buyout after buyout, was itself the focus of a collective gasp when in 2020 its then-new handler, A360 Media (a rebranded American Media Inc.), shuttered the print version of the periodical and a slew of other outdoor titles it had acquired, including Bike, Snowboarder, and Surfer. Steve Casimiro, former editor at POWDER and founder of new age outdoor print leader Adventure Journal, joined the chorus of writers lamenting the shift then occurring in outdoor media. “What’s left is too often shit,” Casimiro wrote of American Media Inc’s. portfolio and ethos in an October 2020 post on Adventure Journal’s website. “I don’t mean Bike, Powder, Snowboarder, or Surfer, I mean junk shows like Men’s Journal. Is this really what you want from your outdoor media—a firehose of pandering, listicles, lowest-common-denominator pap, and nakedly commercial gear roundups designed to get you to click on affiliate links?”

I’ve jumped into the fore myself, broadly analyzing the demise of outdoor media while elevating the newcomers who have been built out of the ashes; niche titles creating a new era of audience-facing long-form, themselves striving for a more thoughtful future for outdoor media. 

But what’s missing from the conversation isn’t another article lamenting the fall of a big outdoor player or a treatise propping up the bravery of the slew of former Outside writers and their latest audience-facing project. What’s missing from the conversation is how the outdoor culture itself feels about this shift.

Discerning what outdoor readership truly wants from its media is no easy task. It’s a gargantuan cohort that knows no clear definition. And data on what the culture consumes is similarly murky. From the affirming to the refuting, anecdotes reign–like print linchpin Mountain Gazette’s publicly stated and impressive thirty-thousand subscribers, to my own observation that few of my friends subscribe to audience-facing outdoor media (or read the titles they do buy). Many of the new independent titles use the conglomerate-owned model as their foil, making clear their position on the current landscape. But broad notions of how readers feel about the state of outdoor media are much more elusive. 

Regardless of the weight the topic holds for writers, some see outdoor media’s fall as something that little stirs the subculture. “I think most people don't care or understand how media works. And that's probably fine, right?” Caley Fretz of the Escape Collective told me in November. After leaving Cycling Tips in late 2022 after it was purchased and gutted by Outside, Fretz co-founded Escape Collective, an audience-facing cycling news site that has seen profound success as a hyper-focused, niche outlet.

“My customers are people that have a $5,000 hi-fi system at home and want to listen to their favorite records,” Fretz says. “There are more people who just want to hop on Taylor Swift on their iPhone with their headphones on than are into what I'm doing. And that's okay.”

Fretz’s analogy points to the feeding frenzy of clicks, page views, and impressions endemic to modern media’s digitized, consumptive form. And in response to the millions who scroll free, content-light and heavy churn models like Instagram, outdoor media–long struggling for eyes since the digital revolution began decades ago–has followed suit. While sites like Fretz’s Escape Collective buck this trend, the success of informal, blog-style sites like Newschoolers and Unofficial Networks and the quantifiable nature of the internet has inspired larger outdoor media sites to begin using a high-cadence, trending news model–often referencing and embedding social media posts in the short articles–to tap into how readership’s habits have evolved.

That evolution has been long in the making. Writing for the Nielsen Normal Group–the eminent research and consulting firm–Kate Moran detailed a series of eyetracking studies the group had undertaken. "We've been saying this since 1997,” Moran wrote in the 2020 piece. “People rarely read online–they’re far more likely to scan than read word for word.” It seems the nature of online consumption; readers aren’t really reading so much as foraging for information. “That’s one fundamental truth of online information-seeking behavior that hasn’t changed in 23 years and which has substantial implications for how we create digital content,” Moran noted.

It all speaks to the basal nature which humans take to the internet, looking for the information they want at that moment, especially in the midst of so much other information just a click away. “These are all symptomatic of the deeper truth: People don’t want to waste time or effort online,” Moran noted later in the article. “As long as we’re designing content that acknowledges that reality and helps to direct people to only the information they want, we’ll be on the right track.”

Proponents of thoughtful outdoor media and long-form prose cringe. While Moran’s ‘right track’ is simply a method for successfully creating a consumable webpage, it has been mainlined both by online decision-makers and consumers, much to the demise of traditional media. As noted in the piece, content creators seem best endeavored not employing deep context, but instead using subheadings, front-loading information, deconstructing longer content into shorter, more eye-catching snippets, and “us[ing] plain language.”

Social media has perfected the consumption of information along these lines–marrying that visual sense with the addictive quality of likes and followers–and digital content has broadly moved that direction, striving in some way to tap into the need the internet–especially in its modern form–so amazingly meets: consuming heaps not of content, but information. The nascent ubiquity of programs like Google AI Search has further distilled content into pure information injection. Thus, outdoor media, especially owned by larger firms with scale in mind, has simply followed these evolutions. If no one seems to read anyway, and thus long-form can’t be a viable, scalable model, especially in the escapist outdoor culture, it's no wonder the large players seem to have abandoned more thoughtful content. 

The actions of certain players has indeed contributed to a diminished outdoor media landscape. But the crux of the issue comes down to the consumer. While outdoor readers do appear to be subscribing to smaller, audience-facing publications who lean into a deeper, long-format approach, it seems many more are consuming the entities and the platforms now often derided by outdoor thought leaders. According to SimilarWeb, a leading web traffic estimator, OutsideOnline.com saw approximately 4 million visits monthly from October to December of 2025, while GearJunkie.com, the flagship site of conglomerate AllGear Digital’s stable of review sites, was estimated to average over 1.5  million visits month-to-month over that same period. POWDER–owned by The Arena Group, which owns scores of publications across a slew of industries–saw approximately a million monthly visits during that time, according to SimilarWeb. 

By contrast, niche outdoor media–while almost always subscriber-based and markedly more focused on a specific audience–sees far less traction. The High Route, a ski mountaineering-focused site that publishes two print magazines each year, was estimated to have under 60,000 monthly online visits from October to December, while Adventure Journal, whose content mostly runs in print but also includes a robust blog complete with a podcast, garnered an estimated 38,000 views per month in that period. Escape Collective came closest to bucking the trend, the audience-based cycling site seeing an estimated 500,000 visitors on average per month in the same period. These numbers are estimates, and SimilarWeb is thought to exaggerate visitor data, especially for sites with lower traffic. But that estimation error is also seen throughout their data set, lending validity to comparisons between sites. All told, it seems that the larger outdoor sites typically enjoy visits an order of magnitude greater than smaller, audience-facing ones.

This isn’t necessarily surprising, and many hyper-focused audience-facing sites receive much higher quality readership. Whereas SKI (owned by Outside Inc.) and GearJunkie have almost identical quality metrics according to SimilarWeb (average visit duration for SKI is 1:06 minutes and 1:05 for GearJunkie, while average pages per visit is 1.61 for SKI, 1.60 for GearJunkie), The High Route sees visits that average 1:27 minutes in length. And 2.05 pages per visit. Escape Collective again takes the prize, with an average visit of 2:23 minutes and 2.87 pages per visit.

That higher-quality readership–no matter how much less volume it garners–is the final product of outdoor media’s burgeoning audience-facing movement.The High Route speaks to this rising ethos in their about page, where they note their borrowing of Escape Collective’s mantra. “They write that part of their mission is to ‘prefer to be everything to someone, not something to everyone,”’ the page says.

Still, much, perhaps most of the outdoor world seems to get its information from bigger players. And besides the pages of behemoths like Outside, that increasingly also takes place on their social media channels, where outdoor titles frequently post article snippets to Instagram on flashy slides, appealing in the body of the post’s text to read the full story at the link in our bio.

But social media traction and quality readership are not only strange bedfellows, they at times seem mutually exclusive. My recent article that ran on this column, “Does Skiing Matter When The World Is Burning?"–an exploration of where our escapist lifestyle sport of skiing fits into the wider, politically volatile narrative–saw some of the strongest engagement on Instagram to date for any of my articles. The piece garnered thousands of likes and hundreds of reshares and comments; something I was surprised by considering the 2,500-word piece quoted Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. at length, and delved into topics typically kept at arm's length by skiers and outdoorspeople. 

But the page view data told a different story. Two weeks later, just 992 people had actually clicked on the article–let alone read it–regardless of it being reshared by pro skiers and multitudes of users; despite comment boards lit up with discussion, both constructive and not. As a percentage of impressions, the Instagram and Facebook posts garnered, almost no one actually read the article.

It seems then that outdoor readers–that people generally–are ever more inclined not toward the deeper treatises found in long articles and print, but the quick-hit, digital realm of social media. Long-form luminaries outside of the outdoor world have even capitulated, delivering condensed versions of stories to places like Instagram; The Atlantic and The New Yorker routinely post long-winded excerpts to the site ostensibly to drive traffic to the actual articles. But how many actually migrate to those sites to read the pieces; how many social media users are actually converted to paid subscribers is surely the smallest of percentages.

My small circle–including myself–echoes the current milieu where paying for and reading long-form is undertaken by a tiny subset. A friend and I, who subscribe to Mountain Gazette–both newer dads with little free time–have long joked about how rarely we actually pick up the magazine and read it. And when I told another close friend–a competitive gravel cyclist and elite endurance athlete–about Caley Fretz’s Escape Collective, he mentioned that he had stumbled upon the site before, even finding an article he wanted to read. But upon reaching the paywall, he noted, “I don’t pay for that stuff.”

And more anecdotes flow forth. A backcountry skiing forum I frequent–a site whose membership includes many important figures in telemark skiing who I have interviewed for various articles–corroborates. When I queried users there nearly two-and-a-half years ago, asking what they actually want out of skiing content, few pointed to print, long-form, or even niche, audience-facing sites.

“For trip reports, I almost never go to publications anymore,” one user–a leading telemark DIYer and Tahoe-based backcountry skier–wrote. “I get my stoke from independent creators on YouTube.” When I asked how much physical print people read, another poster–an elite distance runner, telemark tinkerer, and all-around deep thinker of things skiing–responded simply “zero by me.”

In the midst of this reading vacuum, POWDER itself has taken to a broad treatment of what fits into the skier’s magazine, over time incorporating non-freeride Olympic sports (even cross-country skiing), and ever relying on the trending news model and its social media adjacency, seemingly in an attempt to simply drive consumption of the site.

On the other end of the spectrum, thoughtful, independent outdoor media entities are making an impact on the subculture, often away from the digital realm, finding refuge in print. Titles like Mountain Gazette and Adventure Journal have not only found a successful business model in physical long-form, but a platform for their publishers to bring attention to the changes wrought by the modern outdoor media landscape.

But in a dizzying world of corporate-run legacy publications, indie new-age crusaders of long-form, and affiliate-link cash cows–all competing for eyes with social media–the question remains: what do outdoor readers really want? From data to anecdote, it seems most get what they need not from long-form, but from social media, big media players, and their heavier turn models. No matter the misgivings of skiing's thought leaders, no matter the long-term degradation of outdoor long form, no mass movement away from short-form and social media has happened in the subculture.

While widely criticized for how his conglomerate gutted many legacy publications, a process that has had an outsized impact on the tumultuous shift seen broadly in outdoor media, Outside Inc. CEO Robin Thurston was perhaps in many ways tapping into the perception–seemingly corroborated by social media and the current media zeitgeist–that the outdoor world, like people generally, consumes media not to read deeply, but on a more superficial level.

But no matter how little outdoor readers seem to be moved by the current landscape in outdoor media, no matter how much the refrain of outdoor media’s demise has been repeated to muted fanfare from the skiing, biking, and camping throngs, side effects remain, no matter how innocently the subculture takes to the World Wide Web.

“I think the vast majority of people are probably just Googling,” Escape Collective’s Caley Fretz waxes. “To take it outside of cycling, I needed a vacuum the other day. I'm Googling like best vacuum, right? I end up on Wire Cutter. They're getting affiliate, but I trust them to probably give me the best vacuum. And I just buy a vacuum and I hit the link off of the New York Times Wire Cutter site and they get $3 and that’s great, that's fine. I think it can work just fine.”

Fretz then elicits the unholy alliance that can come to the fore by using gear-heavy, affiliate link models. “The issue starts to sort of rear its head when anytime you have something like that, you're going to have essentially bad actors. And there's quite a few of them, I think, particularly in the outdoor space, that make it look like editorial,” Fretz says. 

“They make it look like they tested this stuff. They make it look like they went out and found the ten best road cycling helmets that they could find; these are the best gravel bikes that you could buy in 2026. They didn't ride any of those gravel bikes. They didn't do anything other than look at a press release for those gravel bikes. They're just sticking up ten photos, ten little copy blurbs and hoping that you happen to click a link off of their site so they get a couple dollars, right? And I think that that starts to break down the trust between the audience and a media title.”

But as much as we might fault the bigger players for their tactics–many of whom certainly do not prioritize depth or culture–the fact remains that a sizable portion of outdoor readership seems no worse for it. Whether borne on escapism, a propensity to focus on pursuit over analysis, or simple human nature, the outdoor world seems to get what it needs from the current media paradigm. And that may say as much about the outdoor culture itself as it does the problematic players now giving us our content.

About The Brave New World of Skiing Column

This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Brave New World of Skiing’ column. Click below to read the previous column, ‘The Death of the Ski Bum, And Imagining Their Return‘.