More Participants Doesn’t Always Mean More Revenue

It is hard to open LinkedIn right now without seeing another endurance event announce a record. Record registration opening. Faster sellout. Biggest field yet. More runners trying to get in.

On the surface it seems like great news for the industry and I'd venture to say it is. But there's just one problem: It is creating a very real trap for event organizations by treating participant growth as a proxy for business growth. They are not the same thing.

At haku, we can see that pretty clearly in our own data. From 2024 to 2025, the number of runners represented in our dataset grew approximately 10.6%. Over the same period, average revenue per registration grew 36%, or $28 per registration. Gen Z participation grew 33%. Gen Z revenue per registration grew 57%.

But telling the story around growth in registration or application numbers only leaves us with a flat, one dimensional story. There's more to know...

Growth Is More Than Headcount

For a long time, participation has been one of the cleanest ways to talk about event growth. More runners meant a bigger event. A bigger event meant more registration revenue. When the biggest constraint was simply getting more people to sign up, that made perfect sense.

But look at two events that each add 1,000 participants. The first gets there by:

• Discounting heavily or aggressively tiered pricing
• converts a lower percentage of the people who start registration
• Struggles with add on sells which means little revenue opportunity beyond the entry itself and
• Has weak retention and has to replace most of those runners the following year, who ultimately have lower ACV and CLTV

The second holds:

• Structures its pricing around value
• Makes registration easier to complete
• Optimizes for up-selling, cross-selling, and impulse buying
• Treats each registrant like a whole customer, which ultimately gets them a meaningful portion of those runners to come back again and spend more.

Same participant growth. Very different business.

Consumer companies have always looked at growth this way. They care about how many people they attract, yes. They also care about conversion, average transaction value, repeat purchase and lifetime value. Endurance organizations should be looking at the same equation.

That means asking more than, “How many registrations did we sell?”

It means asking:

• How many people wanted in, and how many actually completed?
• What did the average participant spend?
• What else did they buy?
• Did we price the demand well?
• Did they come back?
• Did they engage with another event, membership, fundraising program or experience?

None of those questions requires a bigger field.

Pricing Is Part of the Growth Strategy

Pricing can be a strangely uncomfortable topic in endurance. Event teams are very comfortable talking about demand and capacity, but much less comfortable asking whether they are underpricing inventory that is selling out in hours or days.

The goal is not to charge more just because you can. The goal is to understand demand well enough to price intentionally.

How quickly is inventory moving? Where do people actually respond to a tier change? Are early-bird discounts changing behavior, or simply giving away margin to people who were already going to register? Which events have far more demand than capacity? Which products or experiences are people willing to pay more for?

The math gets meaningful fast.

McKinsey has used a well-known example showing that a 1% improvement in price can translate into an 8.7% increase in operating profit when volume stays flat. An endurance event has a very different P&L, obviously. But the principle holds: small pricing decisions can have an outsized impact when you apply them across a large field.

On a 20,000-person event, a $5 difference in average registration value is $100,000. No extra runners required.

And the pricing conversation does not stop at the base entry fee. Timing, tiers, bundles, premium experiences, deferrals, upgrades, memberships and other offerings all change what a participant ultimately spends.

If an event is selling out anyway, “How many entries did we sell?” is not enough. A better question is, “Did we price the demand intelligently?”

Demand Does Not Matter If People Do Not Finish

A sold-out race can make conversion feel like a solved problem. It is not.

Someone can want to participate, click through to registration, start the form and still never become revenue. Every unnecessary step, confusing question, slow page, poor mobile interaction or missing payment method creates another place to lose them.

This is where looking outside the industry is useful. In a large-scale 2025 experiment, Stripe found that businesses dynamically showing customers at least one additional relevant payment method beyond cards saw an average 7.4% increase in conversion and a 12% increase in revenue.

That matters.

Those businesses did not need 12% more people at the top of the funnel to generate 12% more revenue. They did a better job converting the demand they already had.

Event organizations spend a lot of money and energy creating that demand: brand, social, ambassadors, clubs, partnerships, paid media, PR. Then the last few minutes before purchase often get treated as a technology workflow instead of a revenue moment. Do yourself a favor, and start treating it like one.

• Where are people dropping?
• How does mobile completion compare with desktop?
• Which questions create friction?
• Which payment methods are people actually using?
• What happens when someone abandons registration?

If demand is strong, even small conversion gains can be worth more than another acquisition campaign.

A Registration Is Not a Fixed Unit of Revenue

Even after someone converts, every registration is not worth the same amount.

Our data shows that clearly. In 2025, mobile registrations generated an average of $118 compared with $91 on desktop—a 29% difference. The highest-value registrations also tended to happen earlier in the registration lifecycle.

That does not mean mobile causes people to spend more, or that every organization should move to mobile only registration. What it does mean is that the economics are more nuanced than participant count.

Who registers matters. When they register matters. How they register matters. What they buy matters. When they buy it matters. How they pay matters. And on and on.

One participant may buy an entry and nothing else. Another may add merchandise, transportation or a premium experience. Another may join a membership, register for a second event or fundraise for a charity. Same “one participant” in the headline. Completely different value to the organization.

The answer is not to cram checkout with upsells. That is bad customer experience and usually bad sales The opportunity is relevantt.

A marathon participant traveling in from another state has different needs than someone running a neighborhood 5K. A first-timer has different needs than a five-time finisher. Someone who just completed your spring half may be a perfect candidate for your fall 10K.

When you know the customer, those opportunities stop feeling like add-ons and start feeling useful.

The Finish Line Is Not the End of the Relationship

There is one more reason participant count can hide the real growth story: it treats registration like the whole relationship.

Most consumer businesses would never do that. They obsess over repeat purchase, loyalty, retention and lifetime value because acquiring the customer is only the first step.

Endurance has something most brands would love to have. People train for months for these experiences. They travel for them. They bring friends and family. They wear the merchandise. They post the finish-line photo. They remember the event years later.

That is a real relationship.

Deloitte's 2025 Consumer Loyalty Program Survey found that 72% of consumers said loyalty programs make them more likely to spend with their preferred brand, while 56% said those programs cause them to spend more. Endurance organizations have even more emotional raw material to work with than most loyalty programs do.

A runner might come back next year. They might register for another event in the portfolio, join a membership, fundraise, volunteer, refer a friend or buy merchandise months after race day.

The registration is one transaction. The customer is the relationship.

That changes how you should think about growth.

What Should Be on the Growth Scorecard?

If the dashboard starts and ends with registrations, it is missing a big part of the business.

A stronger growth scorecard should include:

• Participant growth
• Registration conversion
• Average revenue per registration
• Average total participant spend
• Add-on and ancillary purchase rates
• Repeat participation and retention
• Cross-event participation
• Attach rates
• Revenue leakage
• Fundraising and other revenue connected to the participant relationship

You do not need every metric on one executive dashboard. But you do need enough of them to understand whether revenue is growing because the audience is getting bigger, because the business is getting better at monetizing demand, or if any other factors are playing a role.

Those are different stories. They require different decisions.

Record Demand Is Great. Do Not Waste It.

The running boom is real. Younger runners are entering the sport. Major events are filling quickly. Registration openings are breaking records. Demand many organizations would have dreamed about a few years ago is showing up right now.

Celebrate it. Then use it.

But don’t confuse a strong market with individual brilliance.

Consumer trends rarely have a single cause. Running is benefiting from shifts in culture, community, wellness, social media, younger audiences, major-event visibility and plenty of other forces no individual event organization created or controls. Strong demand can make almost any growth strategy look smarter than it is.

The real test is what you build while the market is working in your favor.

Because the boom will not move in a straight line forever. Demand will change. Competition will change. Consumer behavior will change. The organizations that come out stronger will be the ones that used this period to improve the underlying economics of the business—not the ones that assumed today’s growth would simply continue.

Strong demand can cover up a lot: weak conversion, underdeveloped pricing, missed ancillary revenue, low retention. When the registration number keeps climbing, those gaps are easy to ignore. But these pitfalls rear their ugly heads eventually and when they do, the businesses who didn't solve for them when demand was high will struggle.

The market will not stay in exactly this cycle forever. Participation growth may slow. Capacity may become the constraint. Acquisition may get more expensive. Consumer expectations will keep moving.

The organizations that use this moment to get better at conversion, pricing, value and retention will be in a much stronger position when that happens.

Bigger fields are great. Bigger overall economics are better.