This Week on The Run Rate - Issue #15
Two weeks in one issue. Four of the five pieces are a platform or a franchisor taking over something the operator used to own, and the fifth tells you what that costs.
Life Time Spends 1.3% on Marketing. Planet Fitness Franchisees Spend 9%.
Life Time spent $38.0 million on marketing in 2025 against $2.995 billion of revenue, and the share has fallen three years running while revenue grew 35%. A Planet Fitness franchisee is required by contract to spend 9% of member dues: roughly 2% into the national advertising funds, plus 7% on local advertising.
Both numbers are rational. Life Time charges more and loses fewer members, so it fills clubs on a smaller share of revenue. The franchise model sells a cheap membership to a member who leaves sooner, so the top of the funnel never rests.
Both figures come from the companies’ own annual reports, which is the point: every public gym acquisition-cost benchmark we could find was a vendor estimate with no stated method, and they disagree by more than tenfold.
87 Orangetheory Studios Closed Last Year. The Royalty Is Charged on Revenue.
The US studio count fell from about 1,333 at the end of 2023 to roughly 1,198 by June 2026. Eighty-seven closed in 2025 against thirteen openings.
The mechanism sits in the franchise agreement. The royalty is 8% of gross sales, so the brand is paid on revenue in a year the owner may lose money. Read what a royalty is charged on before you read the marketing.
Strava Now Coaches the Workout, Rep by Rep. In May It Only Recorded It.
On October 15 Strava added coach-designed strength workouts with an animated demo for every exercise and live set and rep counting. Subscribers get the full library, free users get one sample.
What changed is the job. In May Strava became the record of the workout. Now it writes and runs the session, which is the easiest part of coaching to copy. It still cannot correct a knee that tracks inward, load a bar, or notice that somebody stopped turning up.
Google’s $179 Fitbit Edge Puts Insulin Resistance Trends Behind a Subscription.
The device ships October 27 at $179.99. The blood pressure and insulin resistance trends that make it interesting need Google Health Premium at $9.99 a month on top.
Google’s own documentation says the feature is not a diabetes prescreener and should not be used to manage the condition. Your members will read the headline rather than the disclaimer, so decide now what your staff say when somebody arrives with a metabolic trend line and a question.
If that gap between what a product implies and what its evidence supports sounds familiar, it is the same problem our September Take found across the recovery category.
Peloton Will Not Build a Wearable. It Will Read Everyone Else’s.
CEO Peter Stern says Peloton decided against building its own device and will aggregate five third-party platforms instead, switching on November 6 according to a member email.
Playing Switzerland is the cheaper position, and it is the one that ends with Peloton holding a complete picture of a member’s training while owning none of the hardware it came from.
The Run Rate is free every Sunday. The Take, our monthly deep dive, is for paid subscribers at $8 a month, and it is where we argue a position rather than report one.