Partnerships

Sponsor & Partner with OutsideAtlas

Ad placements, sponsored content, and data partnerships — with the disclosure rules we follow.

The audience

OutsideAtlasindexes over 500,000 US hiking trails, 15,000 federal parks and campgrounds, and reaches readers across all 50 states. Our audience skews toward outdoor-active US adults planning day hikes, multi-day backpacking trips, and family camping. We’re building toward a niche directory + editorial hybrid — high-intent search traffic for trails, parks, gear, and trip planning.

For current traffic and audience numbers, email hello@outsideatlas.comwith "Media Kit" in the subject line.

Display advertising (open)

We run Google AdSense across trail detail, park detail, blog, and regional pillar pages. For direct display partnerships outside the AdSense network (programmatic guaranteed, takeovers, regional sponsorships), email us with proposed flighting and creative specs.

Sponsored content (open, fully disclosed)

We accept sponsored articles in limited categories where the topic genuinely serves our hiking audience — gear reviews, regional tourism features, gear-shop roundups, and trip-planning partnerships with outfitters and lodging.

How sponsored content is handled:

  • Clearly labeled with "Sponsored" or "In partnership with [Brand]" at the top of the post, in the byline, and in the URL slug where applicable.
  • All outbound links use rel="sponsored"per Google’s guidelines. We do not sell rel="follow" links — those are reserved for editorially-justified citations.
  • Editorial control remains with our team. We’ll work with you on accuracy and tone, but we won’t publish claims we can’t support or recommendations we wouldn’t make ourselves.
  • Topics we won’t cover: anything that conflicts with Leave No Trace, misleading safety advice, or products that could endanger inexperienced hikers (e.g., off-trail apps that route through closed areas).

Affiliate partnerships (limited)

We’re selective about affiliate programs. Current focus: outdoor retailers we’d recommend regardless of commission, plus federal campground reservation systems where the user benefits from the link. All affiliate links use rel="sponsored nofollow" and are disclosed where they appear.

Affiliate programs we’re open to: REI Co-op, Backcountry, Public Lands, regional gear retailers, and reservation systems with state/regional reach.

Data partnerships

We’ve indexed and structured a large dataset of US hiking trails and federal recreation sites. We’re open to:

  • Custom data pulls for journalism. Working on a story about national-forest backlog, the most-visited urban trails, hiking-rescue statistics by state? We can usually provide a custom CSV within 48 hours, free for credentialed press.
  • Co-marketing with tourism boards and trail conservancies.If you maintain a state or regional trail network, we’re happy to feature your work in our content, link to your official maps and resources, and coordinate on data accuracy.
  • API access for outdoor apps. For commercial third parties building outdoor products, contact us about licensed data access. The raw OpenStreetMap and Recreation.gov data is free; what we sell is the cleaned, geocoded, classified version.

What we don’t do

We get a lot of cold outreach. To save you time:

  • We don’t sell follow links.Buying links violates Google’s policy and would put both sites at risk of a manual action. Genuine editorial citations of valuable resources happen organically as part of our content; we don’t take money for them.
  • We don’t do guest posts in exchange for backlinks alone. We’ll publish genuinely useful guest content from credentialed authors (trail-association staff, ranger-program alumni, professional guides). The bio link gets a follow tag; in-content links to commercial sites get a sponsored tag.
  • We don’t do link exchangesstructured as "I’ll link to you if you link to me." If a resource genuinely belongs on our pages, we’ll link to it on the merits.
  • We don’t accept comp/free product alone as compensation for reviews. Gear reviews we publish are either editorial picks (no compensation, no obligation to publish) or clearly-labeled sponsored content.

Press & journalist resources

Working journalists covering hiking, public lands, federal recreation policy, outdoor recreation economics, or state-tourism stories — we’re happy to provide custom data pulls, expert quotes on our methodology, and connection to the broader open-data outdoor community.

Press contact: hello@outsideatlas.comwith "Press" in the subject. We respond within 48 hours.

Story-ready data we’ve published or could pull on request:

  • Most-visited trails by state and county
  • Trail-difficulty distribution across federal lands
  • Campground capacity vs. demand by region
  • Trail surface and accessibility coverage
  • Long-distance trail completion statistics (where data exists)