While the weather has not been cooperative for early starts, our pattern is about to change and we're going to have some openings this week! I'll be following up tomorrow morning with some opening projections for our paid subscribers, but right now I want to take an opportunity to share with everyone what we are working on for this season.
So far this season I have been focusing our coverage mostly on our three social media channels at Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, and you should follow us if you aren't already! Our premium coverage available only to paid subscribers primarily focuses on storm coverage and other actionable information, but until the storms start to hit much of our coverage will remain on social media as this is a good time to create visibility for Snowology.
This will be Snowology's 7th season of forecasting for Northeast ski areas, and our 2nd season operating as a subscription service. I've been digging deeply into how people responded last season and giving a lot of consideration to what we might want to change, but honestly the results were great and what we primarily need to do is add to what we did to make it even better this season. So I'm going to go through some things that we're working on this season so that you know what to expect.
- Snowology Club Discounts: We're adding new types of discounts and working to grow our network of discount partners to benefit our subscribers.
- Industry News Coverage: We're introducing a new column called The Snirt and we would like to enable other writers on a variety of topics.
- Ski Weather App Capabilities: We're gearing up to launch deterministic weather, the first step in becoming a weather app, and it's the beginning of an important new chapter for us.
Snowology Club Discounts
For those who don't know, the Snowology Club is a free perk for our subscribers where they can get one 50% discount off lift tickets at the full rack rate (non-discounted price) to each participating ski area, and also discounts on gear including our already announced partner SkiEssentials. New this season will be some lodging discounts and we're targeting 20% discounts with that. If you need to buy gear, lodging, or ski tickets, the savings will more than pay for your subscription. With these discounts Snowology is one of the best deals in skiing and riding and we're going to try to make a big deal about that in order to create better awareness and utilization of this program to save money and create new opportunities without emptying your wallet.
I know that many of our subscribers are not very aware of these discounts and almost no one signs up for these perks, but make no mistake, a 50% off discount for a lift ticket is as good as it gets and discounts have been sparse since COVID hit. So keep your eyes peeled this month as we start to announce our discount partners for the the season!
Snowology
I've been focusing my efforts thus far on more notable additions to the program and we have some who have already agreed and others that have shown interest but not yet fully committed. I will also then focus on adding some smaller ski areas that mostly service more local markets just to help spread awareness because I believe they are important and wish to see them survive and hopefully thrive. Our goal is to have 15-20 discount partners in total this season, up from the 11 we had last season.
We don't take any money from ski areas nor do we make money directly from offering this perk, we just simply love the vibe. Snowology got its start in a large community and having a program like this helps to set us apart from others in this space. When people talk about the soul of skiing and riding it's all about the community and sharing our love for the sport and our favorite places. I also personally love to explore new places, but skiing off your pass isn't often cheap these days, though with the Snowology Club it is and you should use the discounts to make that happen and also save on gear and lodging.
Industry News Coverage
We went through a very disruptive phase in the Northeast with COVID and multi-passes that reshaped our landscape which were at one time hot topics, but I think most people are past that now and so am I. I already cut back on news last season to primarily shorter tidbits on social media and occasional feature articles about notable events not well covered elsewhere.
This season I will be adding a new column called The Snirt that will provide some degree of commentary on news that is available elsewhere in summary form, as well as discussions of things that have not been covered before but aren't too sensitive to disclose or are otherwise of notable enough public interest to discuss. This format is also more appropriate than full articles for mixing in opinion and speculation which I think are elements that we all generally like more, and the tone will continue to be measured. It's actually so much less time consuming to write in more of a blogging format and it is possible that most industry news from Snowology ends up in this new column, though I will continue to share short tidbits and links to articles from elsewhere on social media.
News doesn't make Snowology money nor does it fit well into becoming more of a weather app. I don't know if I will continue to write occasional feature articles due to time constraints and not fitting in well with our primary product. I would however love to have more people contributing who might want a platform like ours to help expand their own audience for non-industry news articles of all types including things like trip reports, history, informative articles, and also good vibes. It will likely start slow but I do hope it will build, and I would like for others to be able to tap into our following to expand their own if that is desired. This is again my attempt and desire to maintain the community that I stared 7 seasons ago where people from all over contribute, just in a different place. We don't sell advertising on our site, probably never will, and we don't paywall news coverage, so my desire to enable others in this regard is not about money.
Ski Weather App Capabilities
Many think our current long-form weather coverage is the cat's meow, and if you are flexible and willing to chase or avoid conditions, our Storm Updates are a fantastic resource and already the gold standard for Northeast skiers and riders, but at the same time it isn't for everyone. Most people just wants charts and numbers (deterministic forecasting) that they can pull up on demand like a weather app even if it doesn't communicate the finer points like how close a ski area might be to the changeover line which is of course would make it very risky to hunt.
Becoming a ski weather app is clearly what we need to be primarily focused on at this stage and beginning hopefully by the new year we are looking to launch basic weather and conditions for ski areas across the Northeast! This will be a fantastic companion for those who make good use of our long-form forecasting as you will be able to find things like temperatures, cloudcover, wind, and things like the number of trails and lifts that are open. It will better serve those who want more than just storm coverage. Lastly it will open up Snowology to a new larger group of customers who simply want numbers and charts. This is just Phase 1 though at launch and there will be some notable deficiencies in terms of snowfall, precipitation types, and wind holds which is what our manual forecasting is currently centered on (along with medium- and long-range weather patterns). We will be working behind the scenes this entire season to develop and refine these things further.
We also will be launching a "reader app" which will be available in app stores. It will not provide the ability to subscribe through the app at first which is why we are calling it a reader app. It will work just like our website does on mobile devices, but current subscribers will be able to sign in and use it, and it will bring new capabilities for us to exploit for your benefit. We hope to have a full app by the following season where people can subscribe through it, but believe it or not, it's a much bigger task to integrate our subscriptions with app stores than it is to create the app itself, much, much bigger. This is secondary to us launching our ski weather app capabilities, so we'll refocus on launching the reader app after Phase 1 of weather and conditions is launched on our site, however we already have done some development and are close to being able to launch.
With the launch of the ski weather app capabilities in Phase 1 we will also be expanding coverage to more ski areas! The following list contains every ski area that has at least a T-bar or chairlift, 50 acres of terrain, and is open to the general public on weekends. We are uncertain about whether we will include about a dozen smaller ski areas as they do not report their operational data to the industry's aggregator of that data which is less than optimal and I have highlighted those in maroon to indicate that they are uncertain. Those ski areas of course primarily serve their local communities. We may expand coverage into other areas of the East Coast over time as well.
Knowledge Is Powder!
-- Matthew Scott
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