👋 Hey - welcome to today’s edition of Venture Daily Digest.
Today’s deep dive is in partnership with Ace Pickleball Club Media, or APCM.
Pickleball is growing fast, but the more interesting story may be the business being built around its audience.
That’s what we’re looking at today.
Pickleball has spent the last several years becoming much bigger than a niche recreational sport. More people are playing, more clubs are opening, tournaments are expanding, and an increasingly valuable audience is forming around the sport.
But there is another opportunity developing alongside the courts.
Every large sport eventually creates an entire ecosystem around its audience. Golf has magazines, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, personalities, events, sponsorships, and major advertising businesses. Football and basketball have built enormous media industries around the people who follow them.
Pickleball is beginning to develop the same ingredients.
Ace Pickleball Club Media, or APCM, is building that media layer.
First, an important distinction
APCM is currently raising capital through a Regulation Crowdfunding offering.
But this is not an investment in the physical Ace Pickleball Club locations.
Investors are buying into Ace Pickleball Club Media, the company building content, advertising, marketing, and experiential businesses around the pickleball audience, which is vastly larger than the number of players the clubs can serve.
Most media companies start with an audience problem
Building a newsletter, podcast, website, or video channel is relatively easy.
Building distribution is much harder.
Most new media companies start with zero readers, zero subscribers, and zero brand recognition. They may spend years trying to build an audience before they can seriously think about monetization.
APCM starts from a very different position.
Through its relationship with Ace Pickleball Club, the company says it already has access to:
205,000+ subscribers
30,000+ social followers
2.5M+ annual website visitors
25,000+ club members
1.5M+ annual club visits
That existing distribution gives APCM a head start.
Instead of building an audience from scratch, the company can focus on creating content and advertising products around people who are already deeply interested in pickleball.
The unusual advantage is that the audience exists offline too
Most emerging media companies can reach people through email, social media, podcasts, websites, and video.
APCM can do all of that.
But through its relationship with Ace Pickleball Club, it also has access to physical environments where pickleball players gather regularly.
That opens up a very different advertising opportunity. A brand could potentially reach the same player through:
a newsletter in the morning
a podcast or video during the week
an advertisement inside a pickleball club
product sampling while they play
sponsorship of a tournament or event
an ongoing digital campaign afterward
This combination of digital and physical distribution is much harder for a traditional online publisher to reproduce.
And it could become one of APCM’s most interesting advantages.
Three businesses built around one audience
Rather than relying on a single publication or advertising product, APCM is building three businesses that can work together.
Beyond the Bounce
Beyond the Bounce is the content side of the business.
The idea is to build media products pickleball players actually want to consume, including newsletters, podcasts, videos, websites, magazines, and personalities.
That creates several potential revenue streams:
advertising
sponsorships
affiliate revenue
subscriptions
brand partnerships
The basic model is familiar.
Create useful or entertaining content, build a direct relationship with an audience, and help brands reach that audience.
Courtside XP
Courtside XP takes the advertising model into the physical world.
Instead of limiting advertisers to digital impressions, APCM can potentially create experiences inside the environments where players actually spend their time.
That could include:
in-club advertising
product sampling
tournament sponsorships
venue branding
events
experiential campaigns
For brands, there is a major difference between reaching someone who happens to have an interest in pickleball online and reaching someone while they are actually standing inside a pickleball club.
That context can make the audience much more valuable.
Hi Digital Group
The third piece is Hi Digital Group, the marketing-services business.
It helps businesses with areas such as advertising, campaign management, creative services, marketing strategy, and technology.
This adds another revenue stream, but more importantly, it can complement APCM’s other businesses.
Beyond the Bounce builds attention.
Courtside XP creates access to the audience inside physical locations.
Hi Digital Group can help brands build broader campaigns around that attention.
The result is one audience with several different ways to monetize it.
The real asset is the audience
One way to understand APCM is to temporarily forget that the company is focused on pickleball.
Imagine a business already had access to hundreds of thousands of people who shared the same interest, regularly consumed information about it, spent money around that interest, attended physical locations, and strongly identified with the community.
That audience itself becomes valuable.
Brands across categories such as apparel, travel, health, food, financial services, technology, equipment, and entertainment may all have reasons to reach those consumers.
APCM’s bet is that pickleball’s audience has grown faster than the dedicated media infrastructure serving it.
And there is room to build and expand upon the newsletters, podcasts, personalities, events, sponsorships, and advertising products that sit around the sport.
Physical distribution could be difficult to copy
This may be one of the most interesting parts of the business. Digital distribution is increasingly rented.
Publishers depend on platforms such as Google, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, where algorithms can change and reach can disappear quickly.
Email gives media companies a more direct relationship with readers, but almost anyone can launch a newsletter.
A network of physical venues is different.
Ace Pickleball Club already operates locations where members play, participate in leagues, attend events, and spend significant time.
That gives APCM potential access to something many emerging media brands do not have:
A physical environment where its audience repeatedly gathers.
For APCM, that could create advertising inventory that is harder for another pickleball newsletter or website to replicate.
Why raise from the community?
There is also a natural connection between this business and equity crowdfunding.
APCM is built around a highly community-driven sport, and now it is allowing people to invest in the media company behind that strategy.
Again, investors are not investing in the physical clubs themselves. The capital is being raised to help grow APCM’s content, advertising, marketing, and experiential businesses.
The foundational audience and direct access to the clubs is what makes it unique from other media companies competing for attention from both the audience and advertisers.
The bigger opportunity
Sports businesses rarely stop with the sport itself. As participation grows, businesses begin forming around that audience:
media
events
advertising
sponsorships
creators
equipment
communities
experiences
APCM is betting that pickleball has reached the point where more mature infrastructure can now be built.
Ace Pickleball Club gives it access to players and physical locations. Beyond the Bounce gives it a content engine.
Courtside XP creates real-world advertising and sponsorship opportunities. Hi Digital Group adds marketing services.
Now APCM is raising capital to try to connect those pieces into a larger media platform. The scale and promise of the opportunity is something prospective investors should evaluate themselves.
But the underlying opportunity is easy to understand:
Pickleball has already built a large and passionate audience. APCM is building the media business around it.
Explore the Ace Pickleball Club Media investment opportunity →
Learn more about Ace Pickleball Club →