U.S. Registration Market Analysis – September 2017

We do a US Registration Market Analysis every 6 months:

• September 2015
• March, 2016
• September, 2016
• March, 2017

We try to make it better with your feedback (so feel free to send suggestions or corrections to bob.bickel at runsignup.com). We do this as part of our own internal market evaluation processes, but share it since there does not seem to be a good source of information like this. Last year, we also added our thoughts on Race Registration Market Trends and Race Registration Company Valuations. Expect some updates to these over the coming weeks.

It is tough to estimate market share since there is no one place that has ALL races, and races are open for only part of a year, and different vendors have different search tools for finding races, so we took several approaches to looking at things.

RunSignUp Numbers
RunSignUp has been very public about sharing our numbers. You can read our Year End Report for 2015 to see that we had over 10,000 races use us to process 2.7 Million paid registrations in 2015, and 2016 Year End Report to see we had over 14,000 races use us to process over 4.1 Million registrations. The trend continues positively – and we are estimating 16,000 races processing registrations on RunSignUp and over 4 Million paid (not including imported) registrations in 2017.

RunningintheUSA Market Share
RunningintheUSA.com is the largest calendar of race sites in the US with 47,936 races listed. This is down from 49,749 last year at his time – a decrease of 3.6%. This may be the sign that the growth of the number of events in endurance has peaked and is falling. RunningintheUSA uses Active.com’s, RunSignUp’s, and Race Entry’s automated API to load races from each of us – that is why you see the little logos for each of us on the calendar. This probably means that we are unfairly represented as they do not get every race from every other of the 100+ registration providers in the market.

We do a sample every 6 month and do a count of the total races for each vendor of 1,000 races in the month after the sample is taken (October, 2017 in this count):

RunSignUp will be used by over 16,000 races this year for processing their registrations, which is 33% of the races in RunningintheUSA, so those numbers are probably fairly accurate for RunSignUp.

October Market Share
There are over 100 registration systems, and not all of them have race listings. For example we could not find a list of ChronoTrack Live races, but know from their public statements that they processed over 1 million registrations in the first half of 2016 and that they have grown since then. Likewise, IMAthlete is much stronger than this list shows because of a number of large events they provide registration for like the LA Marathon. In addition, the search tools may include non-endurance race events in some cases (for example Events.com mixes a lot of different types of events and there is no advanced search filter). Some vendors like Haku and Race Partner, do not have a race calendar. And search methods change from period to period – so data available in previous periods is no longer available (hopefully not because they were avoiding this counting!). And a final caveat to this data is that some race calendars may include races that do not have registration on their sites (the RunSignUp data is accurate since we have a search flag internally we can use to look for races that are open for registration on RunSignUp):

The number of races listed on RunningintheUSA fell by 8% from last October to this October, while the number of races on RunSignUp grew by 15%.

Turkey Trots
We also started tracking Turkey Trots. We counted the Active and RunSignUp races by doing the count based on doing a hand count of races on Nov. 23 on RunningintheUSA. For other providers we just used a manual count from their race calendars.

Alexa Rankings
Alexa is a cool tool that shows the ranking of websites based on page views. It is approximate, but is fairly accurate. As above, there are lots of caveats to this. For example, EventBrite, Active and Events.com all are covering much more than the endurance market and their numbers are inclusive of those other markets.

These rankings among all US websites are from early September and will change depending on the time of the year (going lower in December when there are few races happening and growing largest around Thanksgiving for example). The other thing to note is that it is getting tougher to rank higher. For example RunSignUp has fallen from 4,615 to 5,864th place in the US even though our page views have grown by 16% over the previous 30 days as compared with last year (even with the loss of URUN). So the negative numbers are better than they seem:

To put some context on these numbers, RunSignUp is doing about 3 Million Page Views per week now to get in the Top 6,000 sites.  As further context, another company Bob is on the board of has a page rank of 45,699 and has about 810,000 page views per week.

So What Does This Mean?

Our objective in doing this was trying to understand how far we had gotten with our growth. We are guessing that we are at about 12% market share with our about 4 M paid registrations in 2017 – assuming there are about 40 Million Paid Registrations in the US.

We are really proud of the impact we are having on the endurance and race market. Especially since RunSignUp is a lot more than registration, as we have grown to be a full race management platform supporting the entire race lifecycle:

The integrated CRM database give participants a better experience with things like free results, notifications and photos, while races have better promotional and fundraising tools to maximize the impact of their efforts.

The Race Director and RD Scoring help Timers score and provide results for over 11,000,000 participants annually. RD Go, our Cloud based Scoring and Results system used by Timers and Races hosts results for over 5,000 races and sends tens of thousands of result notifications each weekend. RaceJoy is by far the leading race GPS Tracking solution in the market. RunSignUp for Clubs is used by hundreds of clubs to help with membership management and tie to races. And our free services like Volunteer Management, Check-In App, Race Calendar Widgets are used by many races beyond those who do registration with us.

Thank you to all of our customers who provide us great feedback on what is needed in this market, and who tell their friends about us🙂