Thoughts from the Ultiworld founder.
October 15, 2024 by Charlie Eisenhood in Interview with 0 comments
Earlier this month, I hosted an Ask-Me-Anything Q&A session on Reddit. I have done them twice before, but it had been seven years since I last answered questions. Here is a selection of some of the best questions and responses; see the original thread on Reddit for more questions and further discussion.
User questions are in bold; my responses follow.
How profitable is (or isn’t) Ultiworld? How did you fund Ultiworld in the early years?
Ultiworld, from a pure business standpoint, has been a long road! For most of our history, we operated at break-even or at a slight loss, but often that meant many key contributors working for free or close to it. We’ve always prioritized expanding our coverage, investing in broadcasting equipment, and building a sustainable model over short-term profits.
In the early years, Ultiworld was primarily funded through a combination of:
- Personal investments from our founders (the very first flight I booked to Emerald City Classic — RIP — was with credit card points!)
- Revenue from advertising (initially) and subscriptions (especially after 2017)
- Countless hours of volunteer work from passionate ultimate players and journalists. We didn’t have anyone working full time for the first five years, and I personally didn’t take a paycheck or any money from Ultiworld until the middle of 2018
After hunkering down and surviving the sport stoppage during the pandemic (thanks in huge part to the generosity of our subscribers for remaining subscribed despite receiving little to none of our typical benefits), we’ve gone from break-even to seeing our first years in the black. But managing the cash flow of the company is increasingly complicated because of the lumpiness of the ultimate calendar and when we spend and earn money. For the early part of this year we were operating at a loss, and using last year’s gains to address rising costs, inflation, and to provide much-needed raises to our employees who have been working at below-market rates for years.
Our focus has always been on creating a sustainable model for ultimate media. We’ve seen many ultimate media ventures come and go, and we’re committed to building something that can provide consistent, high-quality coverage year after year.
Looking forward, our goal is to reach a point where our subscriptions not only sustain our operations but also allow us to give back to the sport — most obviously through media rights fees paid to ultimate organizations. We are already taking on production costs with no subsidy from our partners, which is a critical step forward for a media business.
We’re incredibly grateful for the ultimate community’s support that has allowed us to significantly increase our coverage over the years. We are always working to bring more and better coverage to players and fans!
What sort of media criticism do you receive for broadcasting this sport? Ultimate (and disc golf) continue to gain traction but is not broadly recognized- how do you continue to address this and gain notoriety for the sport(s) from a high level perspective?
Because we are a prominent organization in ultimate, there is always going to be feedback, good and bad, about what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. I am proud of the growth of Ultiworld and our increasingly diverse team: we try to be a reflection of the ultimate community with a wide variety of voices represented in our coverage.
To be honest, the biggest criticism tends to center around the quantity and quality of our livestreams. We have significantly increased our broadcasting of ultimate over the last three years: more tournaments were covered live this year than ever before in ultimate’s history by a large margin. Still, people want more, and if there are technical difficulties, that’s an understandable frustration. We have invested a lot of money into improving our streaming reliability — a real challenge when broadcasting from remote locations typically without internet and power.
Our first investment in 2023 was a mistake — the equipment wasn’t well suited to video transmission. So we scrapped it and moved to industry standard for remote video transmission and have had a lot more success. We have routinely streamed from three different locations around the country (or world) in a given weekend in 2024.
To answer your second question, I take a very realist viewpoint. We’re not going to launch ultimate into the mainstream by making streams free or putting games on ESPN or any other “get rich quick” scheme. It is necessarily going to be a long-run, steady build by growing the base of ultimate at the youth and college levels and simultaneously making the top level of the sport fun to follow and watch. There is no shortcut.
What is the toughest decision you have had to make while running Ultiworld?
Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic was really difficult. With the sport effectively shut down for almost 18 months, running a website about it was super tough. And of course we had major financial concerns as well.
Thankfully, due to PPP support from the US federal government and the generosity of our subscribers, we were able to maintain all of our full-time employees without layoffs or furloughs, something many businesses did not have the luxury of doing (particularly in ultimate where revenues cratered).
Still, operating the site was really hard — I have never enjoyed working at Ultiworld less than I did over the winter of 2020 into 2021. But I am thankful we were able to survive!
What percent of all Ultiworld website visits is disc golf vs. ultimate?
The biggest disc golf articles absolutely dwarf the biggest ultimate articles in traffic. If we had a comparable amount of publishing on the disc golf site, I think it would probably outdraw ultimate by 3x or 4x on a straight clicks basis. That’s just how much bigger the disc golf community is at this point.
That said, we’ve done a bit less on the DG side of things this year, primarily because ultimate is a much bigger part of our business. Making money as a pure content website is almost impossible at the scale that ultimate or even disc golf have. The advertising rates are simply not enough to work out for any websites that aren’t getting millions of page views a day.
Because we are doing the large majority of ultimate broadcasting, we have enough subscription interest that we can run a legitimate business in ultimate. Disc golf is much tougher — there is a market for a paid subscription for articles/reporting/podcasts, but it isn’t huge, certainly not enough to divert more resources to it at this time. The DGPT essentially has a monopoly on live coverage at this point, so that’s not a viable path.
I do think it’s possible we will re-expand our disc golf coverage in the future, but figuring out a business model that makes sense has to happen first.
If you were CEO at USAU, what would be your 5-year-plan and would growing player membership be your main concern? How should USAU interact with the semi-pro leagues?
Well, we’re about to have a new CEO at USA Ultimate in a couple of months and they will certainly be taking over at a time where getting back to steady growth will need to be the absolute #1 goal.
If I was taking the job, I would be talking a lot with local organizers in developed communities like Seattle, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, etc. to understand what has worked well for their area’s growth and how USAU could support them further with the things they need (administrative support, legal, or just literal cash dollars) to take the next step. Sometimes, I think there’s a bit too much emphasis placed on trying to get ultimate into places that have almost nothing established — that’s definitely a worthy goal, but it’s a lot easier to build in an area that already has a developed local disc organization that’s capable of pushing the next leg of growth.
Additionally, I would be pouring money into tech (something that has happened more in the last 2 years at USAU) to completely overhaul the score reporter and USAU front end website while also developing a new coaching app designed to make it easier for a parent who’s never played to coach eight year olds in a league. We MUST get away from the idea that our coaches have to be high level current or former players. That’s fine for top 10 teams in college/club, but the broad base of coaching, especially at the youth level, needs to be moms and dads. We’re not going to scale otherwise.
I would also make it a day one priority to figure out how to better support the semi-pro leagues and get USAU membership information and “how to play” guidance into UFA/WUL/PUL advertising and in-person activations. The continuing cold war in this area is so incredibly dumb and counterproductive. Meanwhile, the PDGA (disc golf’s USAU) is getting further and further into supporting the Disc Golf Pro Tour and working together, and they’ve seen a tremendous boom in membership.
If budget were no object, what’s something you’d implement for Ultiworld in 2025?
How about doubling our full-time staff? 🙂 I’d also love to have a full-time analyst or two that just does game film breakdowns and podcasts and such.
If we’re talking more on the broadcasting side of things, I’d go with:
- Specialized player mics that can be worn in live game play (we might do this some day!)
- Iso cameras that only track specific players / coaches during national semifinals/finals
- An across-the-board upgrade to our cameras to get better resolution and longer lenses
- A fully built production truck to travel to tournaments and games
I once heard Dixon Jowers describe a top 20 disc golfer as, “Better at throwing a disc than all but less than 20 people in the world”. If you were to rank the best disc throwers in the world (whatever that means), assuming it’s all disc golfers at the top, how far down would you have to go before you got to an ultimate player?
Well, this is an interesting one! While I am happy to concede that elite disc golfers are better throwers on average than elite ultimate players, I think the delta between them isn’t that large. Being a great disc golf thrower means being able to throw HARD. To throw far, you have to throw hard (and generally with a lot of spin). But we’ve watched ultimate-first strong throwers like Ella Hansen and Brodie Smith transition smoothly to disc golf — Ella is a top 10 disc golfer in the world and, while she was a very good ultimate player, I’m not sure she was ever quite that good. But she could bomb in ultimate, the #1 skill for disc golf.
But ultimate players often have to throw with more touch, and they have to use a really difficult to control disc in the Ultrastar — in disc golf, when it gets windy, you “stable up” and throw a torque-resistant disc flat. In ultimate, you have to throw the world’s flippiest disc on 75 degrees of hyzer to keep it from sailing out of bounds.
So I think the world’s best throwers — Valeria Cardenas, Mac Hecht, Sadie Jezierski, to name a few — are going to be right up there with elite disc golfers as top throwers of a frisbee. So I think I’d say you’d hit an ultimate player in the 10-20 range.
Right now, the best throwers on earth are Gannon Buhr and Eveliina Salonen.
Seeing the way other sports deal with stats and analytics, what are some advancements you see for ultimate in the future? Do you have any hypothesis that can’t yet be proven by data? Or any thoughts on analytics in general.
The UFA is on the forefront of stats in ultimate, with both player point tracking as well as location data on the field. Those are things we pioneered back in 2013/2014, but the scale needed to track that data at Club Nationals, for instance, is just something the sport isn’t ready for.
Until we can get that raw data (along with disc stats like spin rate, speed, etc.), we’re not really going to be able to make a lot of progress with analytics.
I think the EDGE stats work that Paul Wurtztack is doing on Ultiworld is really interesting and a far better mechanism for assessing impact than simple goals/assists/blocks/turns. You have to understand yardage and touches to really see how a player is performing.
You wear many hats at Ultiworld and in your ultimate career. From reporting, to editing, to broadcasting, to commentating… the list goes on. Which is your favorite hat to wear? Which is the most challenging?
Commentating is really enjoyable and I find it fun and easy relative to producing broadcasts (my primary role these days). That said, I really enjoy the challenge of producing a great ultimate broadcast — bringing together the technical challenges of cameras/audio/graphics/replay with storylines and a compelling narrative for the game is meaningful work. And it’s almost required flow state, because everything is happening in real-time.
I often see your posted highlights glorifying dangerous plays. Is there any effort going on to stop doing that?
When we have a borderline play that we are considering posting to socials, there’s a lot of internal discussion about posting it or not. Sometimes, we post it because we deem it an interesting discussion about whether or not something is a foul. Other times, if something looks like a dangerous play but there was no foul called, we may post it.
I don’t think we get this right 100% of the time, but we are always thoughtful about it. We’re certainly not looking to glorify dangerous plays, and in fact we spend a lot of time decrying such plays on streams/podcasts/articles/etc.
What’s the most annoying limitation for filming on an Ultimate field?
I see endzone cam sometimes and scissor lifts other times. What determines this?
Getting elevation is the hardest part. It’s often expensive and requires a lot of logistics to rent / position a scissor lift or scaffold. Many people ask about drones but they aren’t well-suited to full game capture due to battery limitations.
When we do endzone angles, that’s because the challenge or expense of getting elevation is too high (like, e.g., at Regionals). It would cost us thousands of dollars to get the high angle for one day of shooting, maybe 3-4 total rounds.
There are other concepts — like pole cams — that can get elevation, but they are also challenging/impossible to ship and can be shaky.
So I think that’s the biggest challenge (if we’re talking streaming, lack of power and internet at random soccer fields is another big hurdle).
What was the process for developing your streaming capabilities? Did you bring a previous knowledge to the table or did you learn it all on your own or did you bring some knowledgeable resources into the fold that developed it? I’ve been really impressed how quickly you’ve gone from a single, simple stream to multiple streamed games with all the fixings (replay, multiple angles, commentary, graphics, etc).
Learning how to stream is something that is hard to do without actually doing it. You’d be surprised how little information there is online about how to do a live sports broadcast from scratch. So for sure a lot of our development has been trial by fire.
I did come from an audio background — I started DJing as a 14 year old, so I learned about things like signal flow and “producing” a show without really realizing it. (And audio is also a big part of streaming, of course). I’ve also got tremendous colleagues in our video department who have film, television, engineering, and streaming backgrounds, so we’ve been able to work together to scale up a lot in the last few years.
We travel to the broadcasting conference, NAB, every year in Las Vegas — talking to vendors there is also extremely helpful in learning how to scale up.
The big challenge is doing more in the budgets we’re working with. I’m not kidding you when I say that a single camera chain (camera, lens, controls, monitor, CCU, cabling) on an NFL game costs more money than all of our streaming gear put together.
With a lot of money, broadcasting is easy!
What kind of interest does Ultiworld have toward non-NA or European ultimate? As in, is it a case of not caring much for other regions or is it simply about not having the resources to cover them? I assume of course it also has to do with there possibly not being much of a market anyway, or a feasible way of covering those regions.
We would love to expand our coverage even more, but resource allocation (and market size) is a big limiting factor. There’s just not the same level of interest in ultimate outside of North America, and that makes doing live broadcasting around the world a tough sell from a business standpoint outside of the major WFDF events.
PAUC is a super fun event, but there’s just not a lot of viewer interest. The same could be said for AOUGC.
I think people might be surprised to know that even for international events, the viewership base is over 85% from the USA and Canada. Until those numbers start to shift, I’m not sure we have enough money and human resources to start doing a lot more international streaming.
That said, I hope we’re back at PAUC in the future!
What are some of the largest differences you have seen in club ultimate from five years ago to today?
Strategically, we’ve seen a big shift away from lots of “big space” iso cutting and towards smaller, quicker passes, driven by lots of top teams like Truck and Revolution. Defenses are much more willing to gum up throwing lanes rather than just sit on the hip of players at all times. Big space ultimate may have died when PoNY throttled Revolver in 2018 (technically six years ago).
From a player standpoint, the continued infusion of strong youth ultimate players into college and eventually club is really raising the floor of club teams. It’s harder to notice something like that on a five-year time frame, but it’s really clear over time that the back half of club rosters is getting a LOT better, and D-lines don’t play college huck-and-hope nearly as much anymore. They run real offenses.
Do you think the sport has recovered from Covid? Do you perceive the sport to continue to be growing or is it flattening off?
Depends on what level we’re talking about. The top club level? Yes, we’re pretty much all the way back. Normal regular season, teams actually going to tournaments, participation back to pre-COVID levels, probably some growth in the Mixed Division.
But a lot of lower levels are hurting. High school girls ultimate has been decimated and I haven’t seen good signs of recovery yet. Local leagues, anecdotally, seem like they have not come back to pre-COVID participation.
That gets to your second question — I actually think the sport has been in a flat spot for quite some time, pre-dating COVID. Youth USAU membership actually declined from 2018 to 2019 — and that was before COVID decimated participation. Annual overall USAU membership growth numbers went from routinely being in the 10-20% range through 2010 to being mostly in the low single digits from 2011 to 2019. COVID threw a wrench, of course, so we’ll probably not back to top-line growth over 2019 until this year.
Of course, USAU membership is only a proxy for actual sport participation, but the sluggish growth isn’t encouraging for a still small sport.
What are some of the issues, perhaps?
- Lack of business opportunity in the sport outside of making jerseys
- TDs/organizers deeply underpaid and underappreciated
- Bid/player fees far too low to support robust organizations at local level
- Extreme lack of consistent elementary/middle school playing opportunities (I mean leagues, multi-week camps, school-based play, not one-off clinics)
- Intense ideological conformity
A lot of the issues I see do come back to money (as an econ major, I suppose that’s my lens!). We need to make it possible for motivated leaders to earn a living organizing ultimate; otherwise, we’re on a one-way street to burnout and early retirement. We also need to do things like pay observers (did you know observers don’t get paid for working at Nationals?).
This article gets into this topic more deeply.
