Strava puts popular “Year in Sport” recap behind an $80 paywall
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
between this and one of their marketing leadership people getting arrested for being a shitass, they're not having a great week.
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/strava-fires-woman-at-center-of-sf-viral-restaurant-video/
https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/strava-fires-woman-at-center-of-sf-viral-restaurant-video/
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Enshittification at work. Great... But I would think this would lead more to a PR nightmare then to real benefits for Strava? Lots of people will be unhappy, instead of all those people sharing their yearly stats and promoting the app for you.
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Like many companies these days, Strava offers an Export My Data service. Just use that and parse your own data. And if you really want to stick it to them, delete your account after.
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There's something morbidly funny with the fact that corps are collecting and monetizing the data and then asking for money from the very people they collected the data from to share the data back with them.
They don't even have the common courtesy to give a reach around.
They don't even have the common courtesy to give a reach around.
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I’m not familiar with the app. Is it in support of hardware they sell, or does it have some other monetization aside from subscriptions? If not, the benefit to the company of doing this is to try to get the users who pay nothing to subscribe - though admittedly it seems a lot of money to gain that one feature. As far as “but those users were promoting your app for you” - if they were paying nothing, that sounds a bit like someone going to a vendor and saying “do this job for me for free - it’ll get you great exposure, so others will hire you [and maybe actually pay you]”.
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I’m a long-time user of Strava. A couple of years back I upgraded to Premium (before their big raise) - wanted to support the mission. Since the raise, the rising subscription costs and lack of features that I would really appreciate (solid route planning with turn-by-turn navigation, a la RideWithGPS) led me to downgrade back to free (I do pay for my RwGPS subscription). The ensuing de-featuring of the free version of the app is massively frustrating (though I continue to support using their “commute” tag to inform active transportation planners). I “get” the need to generate revenue and, if Strava were to acquire (and not enshittify) RwGPS, I’d move my subscription dollars back. Until then, annual data downloads…
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I just now noticed that Garmin has a "year in review" option as well that's hidden behind a paywall. I don't recall that they had that previously so at least it wasn't something I was expecting and then lost. They do have badges you can earn (steps/miles/activities/etc) and they recently included new badges that are behind a paywall but didn't move any of the previously "free" badges behind the paywall which would have irked me if they did.
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But it WAS free. Now its not. The only expectations were created by the company itself. "Was free, now you pay" is the quintessential enshittification move.
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If it is unviable to give non-paying users, why were they giving it to non-paying users before now? And how much are they earning by monetizing the data the “non-paying” users give them for nothing?
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that shitty behavior by an employee doesn't necessarily extend to shitty behavior by the employer. Especially as she is now an ex-employee.
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Isn’t weird how data provided by users to these services has no value whatsoever, but suddenly becomes valuable enough to support an entire information economy immediately after that?
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Oh oh oh! I know! I know!Cyrus Farivar said:
presses buzzer
Money.
Don't many athletes flex?Matt Cook said:
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Wow, you really must skim Ars! Here is an Ars article from 2018 (that was one of several at the time)
“Heatmap” for social athlete’s app reveals secret bases, secret places
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Oh I mostly agree but it put them in the news for something not great, even if not really their fault.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Garmin's paywall hasn't gone over very well. It offers very little for the typical user and Garmin users have had this interesting thesis (not borne out by anything the company has said) that said 'we buy your overly expensive hardware, you give us an app as part of the deal.' The paywall sort of tripped up that nice little fantasy.
Of course, now we have the slippery slope of more and more features are behind the paywall. Creeping enshitification. Sigh, there is always Apple, I suppose (cuddles watch, hell I sleep with the thing).
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Someone can host sportrecap.com and simply have people oauth their strava accounts & just use that data to make nice charts and animation
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Interesting that all of this unfriendliness has shown up since the idea of that Golden IPO was floated. Including the totally bizarre lawsuit against Garmin. Not going to go into that here but it really sounds like someone in the current US administration is moonlighting.
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I'm definitely not a power user, but I am certainly of the ilk, "If it's not logged on my Garmin, it didn't happen." I'm not exactly proud of that, but whatever it takes to get my old ass moving.
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Garmin hasn't moved any formerly free features behind Connect+. Your rant is ridiculous.
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Long time Strava user here.
The app changed from let's improve features, add new ones and enhance the user experience to ending all of those efforts and turning to make everything a source of revenue.
This drove me to subscribe, initially annually but then, when they continued to raise fees, monthly as living in the NE, I stop paying for Strava at the end of summer and switch to Zwift in the winter. My guess is that other users also developed this pattern and they saw an opportunity to offset this seasonal revenue dip with this move.
The app is definitely falling behind others as someone else posted about Ride w GPS above. There is also significant overlap of features with device OEM's like Garmin and Wahoo in a very crowded space so it's a complicated market to navigate for everyone.
Strava's main benefit now is their user base which has turned it into somewhat of a social app.
As an aside, I wonder how Strava usage breaks out by sport. I mostly use it for cycling but also log running and kayaking activities, with the rare hike thrown in there every year.
The app changed from let's improve features, add new ones and enhance the user experience to ending all of those efforts and turning to make everything a source of revenue.
This drove me to subscribe, initially annually but then, when they continued to raise fees, monthly as living in the NE, I stop paying for Strava at the end of summer and switch to Zwift in the winter. My guess is that other users also developed this pattern and they saw an opportunity to offset this seasonal revenue dip with this move.
The app is definitely falling behind others as someone else posted about Ride w GPS above. There is also significant overlap of features with device OEM's like Garmin and Wahoo in a very crowded space so it's a complicated market to navigate for everyone.
Strava's main benefit now is their user base which has turned it into somewhat of a social app.
As an aside, I wonder how Strava usage breaks out by sport. I mostly use it for cycling but also log running and kayaking activities, with the rare hike thrown in there every year.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Not yet. The concern is that it is a slippery slope. Garmin used not to have a paywall, period.
Calm down, go for a run.
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I used to use Strava for my bike rides a couple of years ago, but they put up roadblocks in sharing rides with others. My only reason for using it was as a fundraising tool for my annual charity ride, so when that went away, I stopped tracking rides with it. I had no idea that it had a Year in Review feature, but these days, the only surprise is that it took those shitheads this long to paywall it.
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No, this is enshitification. Like, the main purpose for these “Year in Review” things is free marketing (and reminding people how much these companies are spying on you). This is something that I would expect them to give out for free.
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This feature literally is only for marketing. It stinks of idiotic, short sighted management
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I'd normally agree with you, but per that KRON4 report, Shireen was a "Senior Manager, Growth Marketing" at Strava, and paywalling off formerly-free features of an app sounds like something that a "Growth" department would do.
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The gating of this is akin to the Van Halen brown M&Ms. Sure, in a vacuum, not a big deal. But in context of the company, what else does it indicate?
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Wow. I'm not usually a fan of violence, but watching that woman get casually tripped after she throws a violent tantrum in a restaurant and pulls the hair of the bartender who escorted her outside is satisfying. Her boyfriend also appears to be an utter tool.
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But it's not free. They're literally using the data provided by the users to power their business. They are nothing without that data.
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I dropped them when they tried to screw everyone over for some quick cash by suing Garmin.
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The biggest benefit of Strava's subscription model is that it is still ad free. While I acknowledge that the collected data almost certainly feeds into someone's ad planning, I don't have to be bombarded by ads every time I log a ride/run/walk/whatever.
That said, RideWithGPS is nipping at their heels and if they don't start improving the overall experience, I'll join the group of "former premium users".
That said, RideWithGPS is nipping at their heels and if they don't start improving the overall experience, I'll join the group of "former premium users".
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