The map before the crowd

In July 2025 YouTube accounted for 13.4% of the time Americans spent watching television, more than Disney or any other media company, and the widest lead any distributor had held since Nielsen began the measure in 2023.¹ It got there without television's prestige or its economics: it was cheap to make, free to watch, and it grew where television did not reach. Disc golf has economics of the same kind, and the question is whether it could pass golf the same way.

The cheap side is already visible. There are 11,165 disc golf courses in the United States, by the count of UDisc, whose app maps them; that is more than there are Dunkin' Donuts shops.² Most of them, 89%, are free to play, and a beginner needs about $15 and an hour and a half.² From 2022 to 2024 the country gained 1,650 disc golf courses while golf, by the National Golf Foundation's figures as UDisc cites them, gained a net 17.² UDisc sells a disc golf app, so it is an interested counter, but these numbers are its inventory, not its opinion.

Golf, unlike broadcast television, is growing. On-course participation passed 29 million in 2025, its eighth straight year of growth and its highest since the early 2000s; counting ranges and simulators, 48.1 million Americans played; rounds set a record, on about 16,000 courses at nearly 14,000 facilities.³ It also keeps the money: the average 18-hole fee has risen about 29% since 2019, broadly in line with inflation.³

At the pace of 2022 to 2024, about 550 new courses a year, disc golf would have more courses than golf has facilities in about five years, and more than golf has courses in about nine. The counts are not like for like. New nine-hole disc golf courses are going in at twice the rate of 18-hole ones.² The map will tip anyway.

Players are a different matter, and mostly an unknown one. The Sports & Fitness Industry Association began counting disc golf in its annual participation survey only in its 2026 report, and its public release gives no figure.⁴ UDisc's app has more than 2 million users worldwide, who logged 21.2 million rounds in 2025, up 86% since 2020.² Those are floors, since many players never open the app, and even several times that would leave disc golf far short of golf's 29 million on-course players.

So the analogy splits. YouTube passed television on the audience's side, in hours watched. Disc golf is passing golf first on the supply side, in places to play, because places are what disc golf makes cheaply. Whether the crowd follows the map is the open part. YouTube's viewers came for things television did not offer, and a free course in a park offers something a golf course cannot, a round on the way home from work, but nobody yet knows whether that is worth tens of millions of players.

The first place disc golf passes golf will be the map. The second, if it comes, will appear in a survey that has only just started looking.