In his first column for ExchangeWire, Mimmo Palmieri of MIMMS looks at why the Tour de France shows that a lot of good can come from an uphill struggle…

The Tour de France just wrapped its 113th edition a few weeks ago and saw Tadej Pogačar win his fifth title, joining an elite club of only four other incredible athletes who have managed to do the same. I love riding bikes and I occasionally build them. I don't generally watch the Tour, but this year I ended up watching a few reels on YouTube that got me more interested in it. So I started with the numbers and here’s what I found out: 

Broadcasted in 190 countries, it drew 150 million TV viewers in Europe alone in 2025, with over a billion hours watched live in total. Twelve million people travel every year to watch one of the stages from the roadside. Cities bids hard for the privilege of hosting one of the Étape. The race  is a media business generating an estimated USD$150m (£111.1m) a year, owned and operated by a company called ASO, Amaury Sports Organisation. The Amaury family has run the tour since 1956, and also owns the rights to around 100 events across cycling, motorsport, running, golf, and sailing, including the Dakar Rally and the Paris Marathon.

An uphill struggle...

The incredible story I learnt is that the media company of today was created out of a volume decline and an almost dead business. In 1903, L'Auto was losing circulation to rival sports newspaper Le Vélo. Its editor, Henri Desgrange, and journalist Géo Lefèvre came up with something new out of a clear business necessity: creating a cycling race around France to sell more newspapers.

It was an instant success. The Tour became a sensation and L'Auto's circulation peaked at over 850,000 in 1933, a 34x increase from the 25,000 copies it sold when the race started. More than a century later, this model still serves as a lesson for many media owners trying to transform their business:

• Strong IP as the real moat. The brand, the historical heritage, the yellow jersey: all of it belongs to ASO. And it's so strong and recognisable that audiences, advertisers, and hosting cities can't get enough of it. ASO owns what audiences care most about and has built an incredible moat around it.

• Diversified revenue stream.  Media and broadcasting rights, sponsorships, city hosting fees, merchandise, games, licensing etc. The actual event is free to watch.

• First-party data is the value exchange. Race Center, the Tour's live data platform, received 27.4 million visits. A good way to nurture a direct relationship with their audiences by collecting emails from a fan base of 1M+ users.

• Strictly controlled production, fluid distribution. The editorial product, the real craft, is strictly controlled by ASO, not an easy job given it means covering 3,300+ km across 21 stages. The content is distributed everywhere they can: broadcasters, streaming services, social platforms, websites, apps, and of course, roadside. They monetise the audience's attention, not the content they produce.

A tried and trusted playbook

This playbook is 123 years old, L’Auto was where many media owners are today: declining volumes, tough macroeconomics, running clocks. They didn’t defend the old model. They built a completely new one on top of it and it was so successful that it ended up outliving the newspaper that invented it. 

Yes you could argue that many media companies don’t have the same defensible IPs in their portfolio, but there might be some interesting ones. Yes, they might not have the same global presence, but neither did L'Auto in 1903. 

The three moats of the modern media brands are IPs, proprietary data assets and relationship capital. ASO and the Tour have all three. What do you have? 

Mimmo Palmieri is an expert in advertising technology, AI, and data, and the founder of MIMMS, a sell-side consultancy. He spent over a decade in senior global roles at Condé Nast and the Financial Times, leading advertising revenue, yield, measurement, and data functions.

You can catch Mimmo on stage at ATS London on September 15th. Get your ticket here.