Fasterskier.com was founded right before the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. We saw a need for a web site with ambitions to create a broader interest for cross country skiing. We wanted to cover not only training articles, but also cover the people in the races and behind the scene, the personalities and psychology in racers of all ages, the events, the equipment, the preparations, the inspiration, the results, the success and failure and so on. We did not want to limit our articles to elite racers. Elite racing in incredibly interesting, but we also wanted to cover juniors, masters, touring, children and aspects of general and specific coaching.
We felt that lack of television coverage had been (and still is) a big hinderence for this fantastic sport to grow and excel in North America. We wanted to see if we could add a little exposure and possibly attract new skiers by writing about things we find interesting. We feel, for example, that training and upcoming events are a lot more interesting if you have been reading about it or seen pictures about it before you participate. It’s like seeing weight training on ESPN and wanting to exercise, or seeing a sporting event or inspiring movie and wanting to train for exactly that. And that’s what our main purpose became: to inform, inspire and excite.
We knew we couldn't be everything to everyone, but we wanted to be something to a lot of people.
It has certainly been a labor of love. We tried to calculate our Fasterskier.com salaries for the last two years and came up with an hourly rate through of less than $1/hour. Despite this, we have had lots of fun, learned a lot, and built a whole new contact-net of friends and readers, not only in North America but in Europe as well.
Comments
We have also been immensely inspired by all of you that have told us that you enjoy and appreciate what we are doing. Comments like this from our readers make it worth doing:
“checking Fasterskier.com is the first thing I do in the morning”, “I’m addicted to your site”
“I check it five — six times a day”
“I read every article every day — thank you”
‘I didn’t know that skiing could be this interesting”
“I love your site”
We appreciate criticism as well. We understand those (few) who would rather that we didn’t have advertisers, advertiser-sponsored articles or that I didn’t occasionally made references to ski products that I sell in my other business. We try to make our articles neutral and balanced, but please understand that we sometimes have to think about our bills too.
The upcoming season
You might have been reading on this site that the 2004-05 training-season has officially started. Fasterskier.com has started the new season as well. Our readership grew by more than 200% last season. We estimate that we had almost 50,000 different people visit our site and we regularly had over 3000 daily readers. Our new target for daily readers is 10,000 — no joke! New and old sponsors will help us grow and improve — support our sponsors!
We have seen a fast growing interest from readers in other countries and are adding additional staff writers to add more variety. Believe me, they are not writing for us because of the pay! We have also added the new Club subscription service to allow us to produce the in-depth technical articles that take a lot more time to prepare. We are gearing up to cover small and big domestic and international events. We are more ambitious than ever and are of course targeting the Worlds in Oberstdorf, Germany as one of many highlights. We also have a number of other new, exciting features coming your way.
Help us improve and prepare
We are very interesting in hearing from our readers about what you like to see more of, what type of articles you liked the best last season, any articles that stood out and ideas you might have for us to write about. In other words help us inspire cross-country skiers in North America and around the globe.
Send us your comments here:
www.fasterskier.com/contact.php
(Please be up front with name and affiliation if you are working in the ski industry).
