How Consolidation and Affiliate Marketing Upended Outdoor Media

For nearly twenty years, a single blog about backcountry skiing—named for untouched powder found well beyond the bounds of any ski area—inhabited a certain lofty place in the outdoor psyche: Lou Dawson’s WildSnow.com.

Expansive in its breadth, the site stood as the high-water mark for the discussion on skiing’s most cachet-rich discipline; a human-powered approach to wild, steep snowriding whose weighty nature rivaled that of activities like surfing as the pinnacle of meaningful outdoor pursuit.

But much of WildSnow’s cachet came from something outside of simple stature and standing. While the blog may have covered a skiing discipline with a rising cool factor, and gave gear reviews and trip reports a home for ogling eyes, the site is perhaps best remembered for its sweeping impact on the skiing discourse. Broad, personal, at times even philosophical takes on skiing’s role in the wider scope of humanity routinely graced the digital pages of WildSnow, a plethora of words tended by a thoughtful ski mountaineer and home builder who received far more regard than compensation for a passion project begun years before the rise of influencers and the ubiquity of a monetized internet.

But WildSnow would not remain an independent entity. As page views became sought after metrics, and the fraught nature of monetizing the web ever reared its head, the sweeping tide of a high-churn internet would come to roost not only in the online outdoor commerce sector; its revenue mechanisms would subsume the subculture’s very content, sweeping magazines, websites, even independent blogs, into a gyre of conglomeration that pressed outdoor content into the service not of subscribers, but novel earning models, upending how online outdoor content was conceived and consumed, quietly affecting these cultures writ large.

Still, as the modern approach to media ever shows its underbelly, a rising demand for thoughtful outdoor content has found its footing, instigating a nascent modern counterweight, with a cadre of audience-driven titles driving the movement.

The Rise and Consolidation of the Humble Ski Blog

Between the halcyon days of the outdoor culture’s long print zenith and the current muddied landscape—now often digitized, conglomerated, in flux—there existed a brief but influential equilibrium in outdoor content. And it was framed by perhaps the most grassroots of all information conveyance: the blog. 

Just as the format took over the fledgling web decades ago, the blog—with its breadth of form, content, and words—gave the skier not only specific, intimate takes on their preferred discipline for sliding on snow. Untold perspectives came to the fold that would not have had a platform in any other way. There was Steve Romeo’s TetonAT, and Brittany and Frank Konsella’s 14erSkiers. But perhaps the holotype of all ski blogs remains WildSnow, ski mountaineer Lou Dawson’s eminent site.

Founded in 1998 and converted to a blog in 2004, Dawson would spend close to two decades at the helm of WildSnow, in the process framing North America’s maturing backcountry skiing subculture. With an approachable, aspirational tone and deep knowledge, Dawson, the first to ski each of Colorado’s fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, posted skiing content both by himself and others without pretenses on everything from land use to thought pieces that pondered the deeper meaning of the ski lift. “I was looking at how people really lived in these mountain towns, everything from family issues to land use and then the actual way we ski and the way we wanted to ski,” Dawson recalls. “Part of the legacy was kind of an honest take on the core aspects of ski touring and ski mountaineering.”

But just as the broader media landscape has been disrupted first by the internet and now its monetized, modern form, the content of even core outdoor endeavors—like Dawson’s backcountry skiing blog—have been subject to acquisition as large, financed firms strive to profit not only from the sale of gear through retailers, but now via the use of affiliate marketing revenue streams used within online media itself.

In late 2022, just three years after Dawson sold WildSnow to Doug Stenclik—a fellow WildSnow contributor and owner of famed backcountry ski retailer Cripple Creek Backcountry—the site would again sell, this time to AllGear Digital, owner of Gear Junkie and Switchback Travel, amongst other affiliate link-employing sites. AllGear Digital had been infused with $40 million in financing from Bardin Hill Investment Partners, previously known as Halcyon Capital, a firm since acquired by Man Group, and would go on to purchase other core sites, such as the surfing blog The Inertia.

Bardin Hill had described itself as “a global investment management firm with core competencies in credit strategies, including distressed, stressed and performing credit, as well as liquidations and cash-outs, litigation-driven investing, merger arbitrage and event-driven equities,” speaking to the big money attention outdoor content creators—even small ski blogs—had seemed to garner. Speaking to the cash infusion, Eric Phung, the CEO and founder of AllGear Digital, said in a press release, “This is an opportunity for our group to double-down and reach significant scale,” bringing into question how a core entity like WildSnow might evolve to meet that goal. But since the acquisition, WildSnow has seen a precipitous decline in content; as of this writing, a new article had recently been posted to the site for the first time in twelve weeks, and since January of 2024, only thirty-six articles had run, equalling a little over 1.5 articles a month.

It’s all been part of a dizzying realignment in media generally, but especially outdoor media, where once core titles have been subsumed into larger models. Additionally, previously important print entities have been pushed to mostly online facings as both a decline in subscribers and often fitful consolidations have become commonplace. That includes legacy title Outside, whose tumultuous modern era is perhaps the exemplar of this changing media landscape.

Outside had long epitomized something else; the journalistic zenith of the outdoor culture. Young writers, the nation over, for years clamored for the Santa Fe-based publication’s legendary internship program, while notable creators long charted the zeitgeist of the outdoor ethos in the pages of the venerable title. Eminent writers like Jon Krakauer, E. Jean Carroll, and Randy Wayne White contributed during the magazine’s rise in the 1990s and 2000s, while a younger cadre that included the likes of Megan Michelson and Jimmy Chin later carried that mantle.  

But amidst a period of tectonic digital readjustment in media, things began to change at Outside. In February of 2021, Pocket Outdoors, owner of a slew of outdoor-related titles—including Backpacker and SKI—acquired Outside from longtime owner Larry Burke, acting as the lynchpin of CEO Robin Thurston’s breakneck purchase of outdoor assets. Armed with $180 million in venture capital funding, Thurston’s acquisitions continued, including non-print entities such as GaiaGPS and Warren Miller Films, folding them into a single, monolithic pay-for service. In a sweeping fashion, the now rechristened Outside Inc. had come to control arguably the most read and most influential media entities the outdoor culture over.

But these moves came with a desperate bent. Just months later, in July of 2021, The Washington Post reported as part of an illuminating piece on the conglomerate’s transformation that “Outside appeared to be running on fumes,” and that “Outside Online acknowledged its financial struggles when it appealed to readers for donations, and Thurston said the magazine had furloughed a number of employees.” Outside Inc. has since gutted their holdings and instigated two additional sets of layoffs, with the most recent seeing the conglomerate cut much of its remaining editorial team in February of 2025. “Nearly the entire Outside editorial team that was in place at the time of the acquisition has now left, transitioned to non-editorial roles, or been laid off,” Rachel Monroe wrote in The New Yorker in April, while Escape Collective co-founder Caley Fretz–previously the senior editor at CyclingTips, a publication that was purchased by Outside Inc in 2021–noted in a March, 2025 piece that “by our count, Pocket and then Outside Inc. acquired 44 distinct entities–editorial titles, divisions, and businesses–across more than a dozen deals. Sixteen have since been shut down. Another three were sold, and three more merged. Of the remaining active media titles, almost all have been heavily downsized, losing print products and dropping staff sizes.”

In response to the February layoffs, scores of former Outside contributors sent a signed letter to Outside Inc. owner Robin Thurston asking that their names be removed from the magazine’s masthead, a correspondence which read in part “we are writing to express our dismay at the layoffs of Outside’s longtime editorial leadership and budget cuts that place an undue strain on the hardworking staff that remain. We are equally alarmed by directives from the company’s leadership asking editors to refrain from investigative journalism and political coverage.”

Long-Form Is Having a Moment

The fate of Outside and other outdoor media companies has been complicated and multifaceted, illuminating not just a fitfully evolving business landscape; the consolidation and digitization of outdoor media has showcased how this evolved approach—often based on affiliate link marketing programs and advertising—has affected the creation and consumption of outdoor content, broadly affecting these cultures. These evolutions have mirrored a wider digital marketplace that has become unavoidably tantalized with the quantifiable metrics and seemingly limitless potential sum of internet-bound readers, leading many titles to eschew a long-form approach for shorter, high-quantity standards that take better to marketable online metrics, often owned and designed outside of the content creator’s purview.

“Nobody could really figure out how to make any money anymore,” Caley Fretz told Jason Albert in August of 2023 on the High Route Podcast, speaking of the fitful years when consolidation and digitization ran rampant. Before co-founding the subscription-model cycling news website Escape Collective in 2023, Fretz had spent years at VeloNews and CyclingTips, both of which were acquired by Outside Inc. and subsequently folded.

Fretz noted the protracted uncertainty of the outdoor digital media age on the podcast with a bevy of rhetorical questions: “Do we go for a volume play? Do we need to write as many stories as humanly possible? Do we need to go deeper? Do we need to drop the quantity and up the quality? Over the course of my journalism career we got pulled back and forth and back and forth there over and over again because frankly the people over our heads just weren’t sure. Because it wasn’t clear.”

What did seem clear in the previous decade’s digital rise was that resources like Facebook and Google not only aided internet searchers in finding outdoor content, they could bring millions of views to single articles that, while not amounting to quality readership, allowed these sites to market page view data to advertisers.

“From just a pure numbers perspective, the peak for most media was probably somewhere in the late 2010s when Facebook was doing its thing and Google was doing its thing and if you weren’t getting millions and millions of page views you were failing miserably,” Fretz said. But as Facebook and Google’s algorithms have evolved, the page view paradigm has shifted, making the previous age’s bloated numbers difficult to attain. “Now, getting those free eyeballs—even if they weren’t worth very much—they were at least a big number you could sell. Getting those free eyeballs is getting a lot more difficult,” Fretz noted in the podcast, also referencing the then coming ascendance of Google AI search.

But as the internet and its search mechanisms continue to evolve, much of the media space is still working within a model that strives for high page views and the marketability it brings to advertisers and affiliate-link revenue streams. And that model has necessitated an approach that requires writers to bring high quantities of content to the fold.

“The end result for people on the ground…is that we were being asked to try to hit these same numbers as we were hitting before and kind of the only way to do it was this high-volume, low-quality approach and that became increasingly difficult to swallow,” Fretz told Jason Albert.

As a direct response, Fretz founded the Escape Collective in March of 2023 with fellow writer and founder of CyclingTips Wade Wallace. Escape Collective has since emerged as an eminent voice in the cycling space, employing scores of writers and posting a deep set of content, all using an independent, subscriber-based platform.

“We call it an aggregation of niches, right?,” Fretz noted recently in an interview. “So that’s what Escape Collective is. Every single person on staff has a pretty narrow beat and they go deep on it and they go and they try to be the absolute best in the world in that space.”

“So you sort of combine a couple interests and that’s the reason why people sign up.”

Fretz sees the debate over outdoor media’s evolution not in reductionist terms, nor does he rigidly elevate Escape Collective. “I’m really careful not to place what we do on some sort of a pedestal, like ‘We do it better. This is the only way to do it.’ No…there’s other ways to do it,” he notes.

But Fretz also sees systemic problems in how certain content now comes to the fold in the digital space, especially as some titles unscrupulously employ affiliate link revenue 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, right?” Fretz says of less-than-journalistic affiliate link-based sites. 

“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 ten photos up, ten little copy blurbs and hoping that you happen to click a link off of their site so they get a couple dollars,” Fretz says.

“And I think that starts to break down the trust between the audience and a media title.”

As the online outdoor media paradigm has endured turmoil and diminishing content, scores have turned to independent media—both digital and in print—instigating a revival in outdoor long-form. And thatpendulum has swung as both a demand to read and desire to supply meaningful media not beholden to affiliate link and overwrought advertising models has taken root.

Beyond Fretz’s Escape Collective, many other entities have sprung to life in this mold. In the revitalized print landscape live titles like Steve Casimiro’s Adventure Journal and the continued success of publications like Backcountry, pointing to a desire for long-form, even in print.

But perhaps the most ascendent title in all of modern outdoor media is Mountain Gazette, resurrected in 2020 by former POWDER editor Mike Rogge. Unashamedly large in form and format, the bi-yearly magazine’s eleven-by-seventeen-inch platform is nearly two feet wide when open. Spreads with dozens of photographs reside alongside seas of words presented in vignette, passage, and tome, the form behind the brand’s internet-is-broken, print-ain’t-dead worldview. 

Rogge notes that the medium is healthy, but its legacy business ethos is not. “Print’s doing fine, actually,” he said on The SnowBrains Podcast in October. “It’s a medium, I’ve always likened it to the idea of radio didn’t die when the TV came along, and newspapers and print. The Guttenberg Press didn’t kill painting. I don’t think mediums can die, I think they can be redefined. I think the business model of print is dead.”

As physical outdoor media has filled a niche away from broad, high-quantity, digital revenue streams, newer print titles are succeeding with audience-driven models and more focused purviews.

“I just think niche media is doing quite well, and we’re probably five to ten years from there being a bit of a golden era again for magazines and print products. I think everyone is finding their voice,” Rogge notes.

Mountain Gazette’s trajectory has been on the forefront of that rising trend in print and independent media. The publication is mostly funded by audience dollars, boasting over 30,000 subscribers. And the title doesn’t cover gear, and thus seems mostly invulnerable to advertorial (and certainly affiliate link models as a physical entity). 

“I do think that we’re still in the early days of this great print revival. And what I find interesting is I know a lot of people with podcasts that are not paying their bills with a podcast. I don’t know many magazines that are in year three or four that aren’t doing it,” Rogge noted on the podcast. 

While Fretz himself points to the prevalence of newer, thoughtful titles like Mountain Gazette and Summit Journal, he also notes that the outdoor space continues to be inhabited by actors whose problematic methods have deeply affected not only the discourse, but how consumers view outdoor media generally

“There are enough sort of sketchy media titles out there that are willing to just put the ten things up on the page that are going to give them the biggest cut and have essentially no scruples around the editorial value of that and the editorial quality of that. And they’re hiding it behind a page that looks like a sort of traditional editorial roundup review-style page. That’s essentially lying to the audience at that point. And it’s just something that I think that we have to be very careful of,” he says.

Still, Fretz’s perspective—astute, articulate, and positive—is buttressed by a counterweight of optimism; a positive view on outdoor media’s future shared by the likes of Mountain Gazette’s Mike Rogge.

“The thing that [Rogge] has discovered, and I think the thing that we are discovering, is that there is enough of an audience…that wants that thing that you can build these media businesses to be pretty strong little businesses,” Fretz says.

“We’re trying to build sort of the best thing that we can build that makes the best product for the most number of people. That’s what any media business wants to do, really. But we’re not concerned with the massive scale that I think has really consumed media over the last couple decades.”

The Silver Lining

While the ascendence of outdoor media entities like the modern version of Mountain Gazette and Escape Collective show that the outdoor subculture still holds a certain demand for longer form content, the rise and prevalence of the model they provide a counterweight to—heavily social media-based, rife with short articles, and often employing affiliate-link revenue models—still appears not only ubiquitous but pervasive.

But a brightness shines on modern audience-driven content models. In March of 2025, Fretz penned a piece for Escape Collective on the turmoil that had ensued at Outside Inc., detailing the open letter signed by many former contributors before delving into his own experience working for the entity. In the piece, Fretz used the analogy of a wildfire to illuminate that while the tumultuous era for outdoor media has perhaps left a scorched landscape, in its place is growing a realigned new guard.

“I’ve spoken extensively with a lot of sort of Outside refugees who are starting new things, and they never would have done that if the big old growth tree hadn’t been taken out, right?” Fretz notes. “There’s a silver lining on the sort of collapse of outdoor media that has happened in the last sort of five years,” he says.

But that silver lining hasn’t only brought new forms to the fold from the loss of shuttered titles and contracted newsrooms. The new age of thoughtful outdoor media—perhaps more polished but whose genuineness is cut from the same cloth the culture’s blogs long were—seems to be making inroads in the wider narrative, perhaps even influencing the larger titles in the space. “There’s a ton of discussion in kind of C-suite media circles at this point about shifting to an audience focus,” Fretz says. “It cracks me that that wasn’t the focus before, but at least they’re figuring it out, right?”

“At least it’s starting to make sense to people who are mostly looking at spreadsheets and mostly looking at P&L’s and stuff like that. The fact that an audience-focused media is starting to make money is good for media in general. And it’s good for audiences in general.”

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, ‘How Gear Determinism Became the Defining Cultural Marker in Skiing‘.

Editor’s Note: POWDER uses affiliate linksin gear reviews. All products are tested at our annual POWDER Week Gear Test, or through daily use on the hill by real skiers.

Related: How Gear Determinism Became the Defining Cultural Marker in Skiing