Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
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One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
Golfnow offers a service that courses must value, otherwise why would they list with them? And golfers get good deals.
It's not clear to me what's so bad about this.
Yes, obviously, they have monopsony power because networks are natural monopolies. The problem is that they can extract rents because of that monopsony power... and they do.
Because it's convenient to have all buyers operating through a single network, that network has the ability to extract rents from the sellers. It should be trivially illegal to operate such a site in the US, given anti-trust laws, but we've decide in the last 40 years that we don't enforce anti-trust in the US anymore, so here we are.
The fact that sites like booking.com can charge hotels a commission of up to 25% per booking shows exactly the level of extractive power that a site this type of power, simply because they were the first to capture the monopolistic network. It doesn't matter that some of the smaller hotels and course will go out of business, even if customer as a whole are hurt, because the total market is more valuable to them by maximally extracting rents.
I just don't see Golfnow as a "single network". I golf with a lot of people that have never heard of them. If a course isn't on Golfnow and I want to golf there, I still book with them however they want me to even though it's not as convenient.
Just like Booking.com has competition from Google, Google also makes it easy to find and link directly to any golf course to book.
I'm not saying you're wrong about some courses not liking them but I have a hard time understanding why it's so hard for courses to just not deal with Golfnow and take bookings another way if they think it's so harmful.
There are small golf courses near me that don't use them and that's fine. Please don't shame the ones that do.
They are far and away the leading tee time advertiser. The golf courses are the “customers” I’m worried about. They are operated by the parent company of the Golf Channel. Comcast was their long term owner until they got spun off.
There isn’t really many companies in the golf space that can compete with that. I don’t want to have to explain things like the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index. My point is that ultimately, these companies are natural monopolies, and should be regulated like utilities because of that.
Probably not. I'm just telling you my observation.
And you're pointing out a problem without offering a solution. Your advice to OP is "don't link to Golfnow". So I suppose they should do what you do and just link to the course homepage... which links to Golfnow? What does that accomplish?
In any case, the golfnow.com is not what most people use to find courses. OP even said they are building their search app because "Google filters for golf course results are terrible". Not because golfnow.com searches are terrible. Golfnow is for booking, for which there are other alternatives that courses can use.
This is the misunderstanding. Golfnow is for advertising. The people booking tee times are not the customer, the course advertising their tee times on Golfnow are the real customers of Golfnow.
My concern is that market for tee time advertising is effectively completely controlled by one company. That should be concerning.
I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc.
I cross reference against other sources but I am only publishing facts, which are not copyrightable in the US.
Would love to touch base one day and compare notes. I work in the golf industry so mostly just made this for myself. But after sharing with some friends and co workers i thought the wider golf community might appreciate it