Back in the old days, the marketing adagium was “sex sells”, and Finance people added to that “Cash is King”. Voilà.

Now, these days things have changed into “content is king“, and most business models are now “freemium” or ad-based.

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In the following (interesting) article, we get a flavor of what are 11 interesting types of Content which are easy to sell, or more precisely, which can be given away for free : http://www.jeffbullas.com/2015/05/30/content-marketing-tips-11-types-of-content-that-people-love-to-share.

Many of these content types have facts&figures in them! Nr 3. (“Statistics”), Nr 4. (“Infographics”), Nr 7 (“Tweets with images, or mini-infographics”), etc., are all based on number-crunching. This suggests that Content is King, but  Facts&Figures are Queen ? This is a basic observation when reading new / digital media: we seem to have become addicted to facts&figures.

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These days, bigger amounts of data are available than ever before (“Big Data”), so we want to read all about the insights from these data.For example, Boston, one of the most famous marathons Worlwide now has infographics about the army of volunteers (+90.000 !), its fundraising result (more than 23 mn USD !), and the number of busses needed for transport (+800), and so on.

To be honest : some of these details (e.g. the number of toilet towels), I was not really keen to know, but okay.

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So, what about running in Belgium? Do you know great sources of interesting facts&figures about running in Belgium ?

Runners World published a couple of interesting stats, in it July 2015 edition: Runners in Belgium spend (on average) 217 euro per year on running. Compared to Finland, 819 euro per year.

Staggering: almost 40% of this yearly goes to shoes, and almost 30% to clothes. Nearly nothing is spent on Healthcare / physio, coaching / training, etc.

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Running & racing in Flanders has increased steeply, more than 300.000 people in Flanders participate in race events, that’s 40% more than 10 years ago.

With the following three major transformations:

1. In 1969 only 23% of runners in Flanders were older than 40 years, in 2007, this was the large majority (54%) !
2. In 1969 only 11% of runners were female, catching up to (almost) half (43%) in 2007.
3. In 1969 only 16% had low(er) socio-economic status, versus 38% in 2007.

 So, what’s next ?

I guess we can expect many interesting insights from the heaps of data that are collected from running apps (Runkeeper, etc.)? Any useful reports or infographics about that – out there ?

Good evening !

Peter