Much ado about Outside

A few weeks ago Outside announced new updates to the Outside+ ecosystem, integrating a social media feed into both the Outside website and Outside associated apps like GaiaGPS. Reactions ranged from tepid disdain to outright hostility, with some users of GaiaGPS expressing that this was the last straw (following years of weak support and price hikes that many felt were unnecessary and excessive). It’s the latest move from the magazine turned media turned tech company in their quest to become everything for everyone in the outdoors.

The new social features feel purpose built to increase the surface area of Outside’s advertising and promoted posts and improve the connectivity across the various apps and properties in their ecosystem. It's a broader push for a unified Outside profile, connecting all your engagement across different websites and apps. The goal is to get you to follow Outside publications, authors, and your friends in order to populate a feed of content. Think Twitter/Facebook, but focused on Outside properties.

The challenges

It’s really hard to entice people to build a new social graph from scratch. Just look at the graveyard of failed Instagram competitors that couldn’t get over the hump of rebuilding existing audiences. The most recent social success, Threads, has largely been successful because it was able to kickstart a feed and followers using your Instagram network.

Notably, the new social features don’t offer any kind of way to quickly populate your feed, leading to a “cold start” problem. There are no connections to other social networks to help you build your graph and it’s somewhat unclear why a GaiaGPS user would want to see random Outside Magazine articles or Trailforks content in their mapping app. I opened my “home” feed to an article titled “I Don’t Care if Your Toddler Climbs a Mountain” – a story published in 2021 that is indicative of Outside’s constant re-sharing of their most successful “engagement-bait” articles over and over again (I’ve seen this one a dozen times across several social platforms). The initial experience is not an inspiring one – I have no desire to follow Outside brands or authors inside a mapping app, I don’t know any friends who are active in the Outside network, and it’s unclear who I would expect to reach by sharing my other activity here that I wouldn't on Strava or other social platforms.

There are also privacy implications. I don’t remember my default GaiaGPS privacy settings, and I typically don’t record there anymore, but the “Outside Network” settings had both my profile as public and my activity privacy automatically set to “Everyone - Your activities and posts are visible to all user. Recorded tracks will also appear on Gaia GPS Public Tracks layer” (typos not mine). One user I spoke to had previously connected Strava to Trailforks; they said that the Outside feed had started publishing their private Strava activities to a public feed via Trailforks. A GaiaGPS product lead had the hapless job of defending changes to an aggravated Reddit community with significant concerns about both privacy and a lack of focus. And tech-wise, while this was a project years in the making, the final implementation still feels rough. The feed isn’t even integrated directly into the GaiaGPS app, it’s a bunch of webviews, which is why there’s a cookie banner and a bunch of strange navigation patterns.

The overt integration makes a lot of assumptions about the type of things that people want to see (and where). I’m sure that folks at Outside would tell me that “this is something that people asked for”, and maybe they’re right. Perhaps a majority of people interviewed or polled said that they’re interested in something like this. I suspect there was interest in "better sharing" or an "activity feed" like Strava. But, there’s often a big difference between what people say they want, and what they actually do. Famously, Walmart once reorganized its stores based on leading questioning and lost millions of dollars in the process. And this feels to me more like “we need a big thing to serve our internal goals” than a “we’re confident that people want to interact with Outside in this way”. GaiaGPS is not Strava. And "better sharing" doesn't necessarily mean "connected to a big network of stuff I didn't ask for".

I still believe that both GaiaGPS and Trailforks will continue to improve as products. They’ve made several hires on the product and design side and I expect to see new developments in those apps. However, this haphazardly integrated social media feed could be an early indication that there are top-down forces and personalities at work influencing product direction in…less than ideal ways. And even if things continue to improve, it seems that the Outside+ ecosystem will be much more ‘in your face’ moving forward. I don’t personally think that’s a good thing – GaiaGPS has been more or less insulated from the wider “Outside+” network for a while, and I think that was a good thing.  I don’t think there’s a ton of brand loyalty to Outside, and increasingly folks feel like price increases for the apps that they use are subsidizing a network of products (Outside+) that they don’t actually care about.

I don’t love writing about Outside, and for your sake I’ll avoid too many meta outdoor media industry topics. But, it’s hard to avoid talking about developments from the company that is the largest player in our industry – at least by pure surface area.  When you’ve raised big money (as Outside has), you often need to take big swings. Outside is beholden to continuous user and revenue growth in order to conform to the VC funding model. Some of those swings, like an AI chatbot (is anyone using it?) and their big push for NFTs, have been duds. Necessarily, I need to acknowledge that while I may not be the right user archetype, perhaps there are people somewhere genuinely interested in Outside’s social network. And while I don’t personally see the social feed as a home run, that’s not to say that Outside hasn’t had recent successes as well. By all accounts, the Outside Festival appears to have been received well and well attended by both the industry and consumers. And while the social feed may or may not be a success for increasing ad views, time in-app, or on-site, the associated applications remain useful and valuable. The feed, while potentially annoying and indicative of misplaced focus, doesn’t actually detract from the core GaiaGPS or Trailforks feature set. Outside’s reach remains high, and we’ve yet to see the full strategy behind their recent acquisition of the MapMyFitness suite of products.

But, how long can one keep swinging for the fences before the money runs out? I have no way of knowing whether this will ever be the case for Outside, but one way to look at the MapMyFitness acquisition is buying an audience rather than continuing to grow one. In many ways, it’s the constant cycle of tech companies. Startups grow by building unique solutions that stand out, and then if successful, often continue growing until they lose their identity. They can eventually alienate customers by catering to the lowest common denominator or chasing goals and features that aren’t aligned with their community. Ever since Outside started buying up the entire outdoor industry, we’ve seen concurrent growth of smaller companies started by people dissatisfied with the new state of the industry and by the employees of previously acquired companies. I can’t say if that will continue to be the case or not, but it’s been an interesting trend.

There are almost always two ways (or more) to look at a situation. Mostly, I’m just confused. I know I wasn’t the only one scratching my head about these new developmements, and there are many folks who are more aggressively annoyed by these new changes. But rather than viewing this as a negative for the industry or even for Outside, I see opportunities for individuals and new companies to grow and develop core audiences in ways that bigger companies either can’t or can’t do in a profitable way. Outside will continue to be one of the major players for years to come. But, there’s always room for something new.

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