The Playbook | No. 44

Everyone’s chasing clicks. Almost no one is building something that lasts. While golf media fights for traffic, a quieter model is pulling ahead: smaller audiences, deeper trust and real revenue.

I’ve been building it with The Cactus Club. Six months in, the results say more than any viral post ever could.

The Playbook | Insider POV

Most golf media today is built for clicks, not for connection, and the difference between the two is why so many brands look big on the surface but struggle to turn attention into anything that compounds over time.

They’re publishing more than ever, clipping more than ever, chasing trends faster than ever, and somehow ending up with less leverage, less loyalty, and less control over their own audience than they had five years ago.

That’s not growth.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that doesn’t get said out loud nearly enough.

Traffic is a vanity metric if you don’t own the relationship behind it, and most golf media companies are renting their audience from algorithms they don’t control and advertisers who don’t care.

You can have 100,000 readers and still struggle to sell a meaningful partnership, because those readers don’t actually know you, trust you, or feel like they’re part of anything.

They just clicked. And then they left.

Meanwhile, a completely different model is quietly pulling ahead, and it doesn’t look impressive at first glance, which is exactly why most people ignore it.

Community-first.

Smaller audience, deeper trust, stronger identity, and most importantly, real monetization paths that don’t rely on chasing the next spike in attention.

I’ve been building this in real time with The Cactus Club, and the results are starting to tell a very different story than what most people expect from a “media brand.”

No paid ads, no viral gimmicks, no content treadmill designed to game an algorithm, just consistent publishing, a very specific audience, and a clear point of view that doesn’t try to be for everyone.

Six months in, we’re at 1,500 subscribers and 25 paid members, all organic, all earned, all coming from people who actually care about the same thing.

If you’re addicted to big numbers, that won’t impress you.

If you understand how media businesses actually make money, it should make you pause.

Because the goal was never to reach everyone.

The goal was to matter to someone.

Traffic-first media asks how to get more clicks, impressions, eyeballs, and reach, as if scale alone is the answer to every problem.

Community-first media asks how to become part of someone’s weekly routine, how to show up consistently enough that your content becomes expected, and how to build something that people would actually notice if it disappeared.

One model creates spikes that fade.

The other creates habits that compound.

Most golf media brands today are just content farms with better logos, and that might sound harsh, but it’s the reality when you look at how little differentiation actually exists across the space.

They don’t know their audience beyond surface-level demographics, they don’t build relationships beyond a single click, and they don’t create anything that holds value once the moment passes.

They are renting attention.

And rented attention is the most fragile asset in the game.

So when algorithms shift, when ad markets tighten, or when a new platform comes in and resets the playing field, they scramble, because they never actually owned the relationship in the first place.

That’s the trap. We went the other direction.

We went local, specific, and intentionally narrow, focusing on 0–9 index golfers in Arizona who care deeply about how they play, where they play, and who they play with, because that’s where the real signal is.

Every piece of content is built around a simple filter: Does this make someone a better golfer or give them a better experience this weekend? If it doesn’t, it doesn’t get published.

That constraint is the advantage.

And yes, early on, there were moments when going broader would have inflated the numbers, when chasing a bigger audience would have made the metrics look better, and when it would have been easy to justify playing the traffic game.

But broad doesn’t build anything. Depth does.

That’s where trust comes from, and trust is the only metric that actually compounds over time.

Not impressions. Not followers. Not even subscribers.

Trust.

It’s why 25 people were willing to pay within six months, not because content was locked behind a paywall, but because they wanted to be closer to the community, closer to the events, closer to the identity that was forming around the brand.

People don’t pay for content.

They pay for access, for identity, and for a sense of belonging to something that reflects how they see themselves.

At the same time, the top of the market is moving in the opposite direction, scaling content production through automation, personalization, and sheer volume, a trend that will only accelerate from here.

The PGA Tour is already producing thousands of highlight clips per week, tailored to different players, regions, and audience segments, creating a form of golf media optimized entirely for reach.

That lane will be won by scale.

This leaves a massive opportunity in the middle: while everyone else is fighting for attention, very few are building something that creates belonging.

And belonging is where the real value is.

Because when you build a true community, the business model expands naturally.

Content turns into events, events turn into partnerships, partnerships turn into products, products turn into data, and data turns into consulting and capital opportunities that extend far beyond the original media layer.

Now you’re not just running a newsletter.

If you’re still playing the traffic game, here’s what happens:

You stay busy, you feel relevant, and you struggle to build anything that lasts.

If you build a community, here’s what happens:

You grow slower at first, you question whether it’s working, and then suddenly the flywheel starts to turn and everything compounds at once.

If I were starting today, I would ignore almost everything happening in golf media and focus on three things that actually matter:

Pick a niche you understand at a deep level, serve that audience obsessively for six months without trying to scale too early, and measure replies instead of clicks, because clicks tell you what people looked at and replies tell you what they care about.

That difference is everything.

Golf media won’t be won by whoever gets the most attention.

It’s going to be won by whoever has the strongest relationship with a specific audience, and right now, most of the industry is still playing a game that doesn’t lead to that.

What you missed last week:

Why your brand is overpaying creators

The Playbook | Trending

The Playbook | News

The Playbook | Career

The Playbook | Report

With AdQuick, executing Out Of Home campaigns is as easy as running digital ads. Plan, deploy, and measure your real-world advertising effortlessly — so your team can scale campaigns and maximize impact without the headaches.

Visit AdQuick.com

Golf isn’t just a sport anymore: it’s an economy.

Impact Report Vol. 1 breaks down how fandom, data, and culture are shaping golf’s $25B future. From sponsorship ROI to fan value, this quarterly deep dive gives operators and founders the edge they’ve been missing.

The Playbook | Insider

Paul Shaw is quietly becoming one of the most important operators in modern golf apparel. As Director of Operations at Sun Day Red, he’s focused on the unsexy work that actually wins, sales enablement, process optimization, and operational discipline.

Before that, he helped scale TravisMathew in multiple leadership roles, from sales ops to order management, building the systems that underpin one of golf’s most successful modern brands.

The Playbook | Gift

One lucky member wins an annual membership.