An Upper Green River backcountry ski yard sale.
A note from The High Route team regarding industry support and transparency.
Some of you might have noticed a new addition to our website footer. There’s this statement, “The High Route is made possible with sponsorship from:” and a Blue Ice logo below it.
Since our inception, we’ve welcomed industry support. On our “Industry Partners and Supporters” page, which has been up since we launched, you can read this: “We seek partners to assist us in being more creative. Please reach out if you want to learn about our tiered partnership levels focused on developing our freelance budget and supporting The High Route’s mission.”
The kind of support we seek is financial—a sponsor/supporter (we’ll use those words interchangeably) provides money to offset the cost of operating The High Route. They, in turn, help grow our mission with no explicit strings attached. We serve readers first and hope this model helps build something that can stick around for a while and help inform the community. This also begs the question of what a supporter gets in return.
We are not the number crunchers at any outdoor company we interact with, and the return on investment for sponsoring an influencer or an entity like The High Route can be a mystery. We’d like to think the ROI for an industry supporter of The High Route is simple, they know we aspire to build something long-term that positively impacts their core customers.
Let’s take gear reviews. We don’t accept money for gear reviews. We don’t receive even more money to bump a product into the “to be considered for an award” category (we don’t participate in the whole award thing). We do, however, accept gear from brands to review. When we cannot secure an item we’d like to review, we purchase the gear. The gear we review does not track with “best-selling” items at larger outdoor product retailers (a good strategy if SEO and number of clicks is the primary objective). Further, we don’t review every backcountry product; we review products we believe our readers should learn more about. (We are also open to our readers’ suggesting products for review.)
We do not provide affiliate links, banner ads, or sponsored content to industry supporters. This 100% impacts us, as these are standard practices for generating income. No matter what we say about “why you should trust us” in some marketing copy where we explain why you should trust us, we decided on day one that we’d keep it simple regarding how we earn income.
To provide some insight, when we pitch a company on supporting THR, we bring up the Surfer’s Journal. (Which, to our knowledge, does not do gear reviews.) On their footer, which we modeled ours after, you’ll see numerous brand logos that link to pretty basic brand-specific values statements, social media channels, and maybe a brand video. That’s similar to what we pitch potential supporters. We believe this allows us to build out THR in a “commercially quiet” way.
OK, so Blue Ice. They approached us and said something like “We think this is a great thing for the ski community, how can we support it?”
The conversation that followed was basic. It went like this: “Here’s what we do, and here’s how you can help us.” We do/did outline what we state above, that we don’t do affiliate links/sponsored content/banner ads, or favorable gear reviews in return for support.
The bottom line is that Blue Ice wants to support our mission, so they have become our first industry supporter. We are psyched to have them on board and appreciate their commitment to our business practices.
