Runnersworld.com hits its STRIDE

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct, 2000 by Jane E. Zarem

Q&A: RODALE'S GEORGE A. HIRSCH

Runner's World publisher George A. Hirsch has every reason to be proud. His print magazine is No. 1 in its field and has boosted circulation in each of the past five years. But he's also successfully sprinting into the online world: The runnersworld.com Web site, which Hirsch also oversees, is not only very popular, it's turning a profit as well.

One of the key advantages Hirsch has is that he knows what parts of the site visitors are most interested in, thanks to Web technology, and he can guide the business accordingly. Runnersworld.com uses NetGravity software to track page view impressions. From this data, runnersworld.com knows that next to the home page, the Training area racks up the most impressions, accounting for nearly a third of the site's traffic. After that comes the Shoes section, followed by the calendar of Events and the daily news items. And when there's coverage of a major event, all the regular areas take a back seat in terms of driving site traffic.

"We can track how the people go through the site to see how much time they're spending in certain areas," says associate publisher Claudia Malley, who oversees advertising on the site. "We then try to deliver that information in other ways to get more people interested. We also promote on the home page the areas that the tracking numbers indicate are the most popular."

Foliomag.com recently spoke with Hirsch to find out what makes runnersworld.com a successful e-publishing play, and what's ahead for what he calls "the voice of running" online.

Q: What was the challenge when you set up runnersworld.com? What were you trying to accomplish?

A: Everyone wants their site to be "sticky." But if you're just archiving your magazine and putting it on the Web, that's hard to do. We recognized from the beginning that we didn't want to simply put our magazine online. That wasn't our purpose in having a Web site. We discovered that in recent years a lot of the readers of our magazine, which is for runners, have become interested in general fitness and broader health and nutrition issues, certainly along with training for races, injury prevention, and things of that sort. So we were looking to serve our audience in new and exciting ways. We also thought the site could profitably extend our brand. And it's doing that. It's making money for us.

Q: What makes runnersworld.com work?

A: You'll find on the site (as in the monthly print magazine as well] our shoe surveys, how-to training, injury prevention, nutrition, and other useful stuff. But what's really different about what we're doing on the Web is the daily journalism. We do daily news five days a week--that's like a runner's sports page. Visitors can find stories on who's going to run tonight in Zurich, who's getting injured, what's the latest doping scandal, and that kind of information. And we have live Webcasts from major events, so visitors can follow races, mile by mile, right at their desktops.

An estimated 22 million to 24 million people, depending on your numbers, are interested in running. Yet sports pages don't cover running beyond the big events. They cover the New York and Boston marathons each year and the Olympics every four years, and that's about it. It's hard for people to find running news. We saw that as a great opportunity, and it has worked exceedingly well for us. So that's one of the key ingredients in making our site very sticky. It's a turf, I think, that we've really claimed very much as our own. We have a dedicated following, and they come onto our site day after day to read our daily news items on running.

Also, there's an opportunity for a lot of back-and-forth among runners, a lot of "forum"--Did you run the Chicago Marathon? Tell me about it. Is it hilly? Is it difficult? And on and on. There's just a whole communication that goes on among them. And certainly our training programs, and the calendar of running events, and our running shoe surveys are all things that are very appropriate for people to access on the Web.

Q: Who is your audience? Has it changed over the years?

A: We still have more men than women subscribers to Runner's World. But in recent years, the growth that we've seen in running, which has been really substantial, is being fueled by women. We're now in our fifth year of successive ratebase increases, and 70 percent of all our new subscribers are women.

In the running boom that began right after the 1972 Olympics, it was a man's deal. In those days of Rogers and Shorter and books by Jim Fixx, we would get up in the morning and run to the horizon. Forget the fact that careers and marriages were suffering mightily. Running was quite obsessive. People who weren't naturally competitive or natural athletes were out there trying to run a three-hour marathon. And they got injured. Then there was a kind of burnout as people began to realize that there was another life out there.

In the last handful of years, running has come back--but much more in terms of weight loss, stress reduction, and overall health. And Runner's World has seen a real shift in editorial direction. We tell people now to jog a mile and walk five minutes, then jog another mile and walk home. We never would have said that 20 years ago. People would have written us letters and said, "This isn't a running magazine!" Today, people go to the gym one or two days a week, run two or three days a week--and if there's a Race to the Cure, maybe they'll run it with their mom!