July 9, 2026

GolfNow’s Prime Directive

Versant’s Will McIntosh gives an inside look at the company’s membership model borrowed from Amazon, a $530 million simulator deal, and a bet on owning golfers for life

July 9, 2026

Mollie Cahillane | mollie@bigswingmedia.news

Half of GolfNow’s booking revenue comes from GolfPass members who make up a fraction of its overall users. Versant built it that way on purpose, borrowing a page from Amazon Prime.

That’s Will McIntosh’s assessment. Versant’s president of digital platforms and ventures built the model when GolfPass launched in 2019 alongside partner Rory McIlroy. “It wasn’t so much about getting people to pay them the subscription fees for Prime,” he told Big Swing Media. “It’s about the psychology that changes in a consumer when they join a paid membership, and what that reinforces around their share of wallet.”

Seven years later, that bet is paying off. Six months after Versant’s spinoff from Comcast became official, the company is turning a sports vertical into a self-reinforcing digital business.

GolfPass and GolfNow sit inside Versant’s Platforms segment, which posted $192 million in revenue last quarter, up roughly 9%, with GolfNow cited as the primary driver. It’s a small piece of a company that also owns USA Network, CNBC, MS Now (formerly MSNBC) and Golf Channel. McIntosh’s portfolio, which also includes Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, is the clearest bet Versant has made on direct-to-consumer digital revenue outside of cable. This week, Versant also agreed to buy golf simulator company Full Swing for $530 million, its latest of more than 15 mergers and acquisitions under McIntosh.

‍The Prime playbook

Before 2019, what’s now Versant had a couple of different digital membership products, like Revolution Golf, which it acquired in 2017, and a loyalty program inside GolfNow called GolfNow VIP. When the team consolidated around a single membership strategy, McIntosh said two references helped shape the thinking: Amazon and Golf Channel’s own history.

"Golf Channel is arguably the most successful single sports network ever launched," McIntosh said of the network, founded with Arnold Palmer in the mid-'90s. "When we were thinking about a brand ambassador to be part of GolfPass, we aligned on Rory because we felt like he had a lot of the same qualities Arnold Palmer had." The pitch, internally, was something like: If you were reimagining Golf Channel for the streaming age, what would it be?

You can find the answer in GolfPass’ content library — legacy Golf Channel archives, daily produced instruction from top teachers, and original documentaries like a chronicle of McIlroy’s Boston TGL team and an ongoing series on the Cobbs Creek renovation in Philadelphia. Versant also partnered with who else but Amazon on a documentary marking McIlroy’s career Grand Slam at the Masters.

With content as the hook, bookings make the business. "The big driver is the value that it unlocks if you book your tee times through GolfNow," McIntosh said. Membership for the company’s top tier costs roughly $120 per year (a video-only version clocks in at $49 annually), and includes waived online service fees on most bookings, a multiplier on loyalty points, and a recently added early-access benefit for the best tee times at the best courses, a feature more than half the members have already used, according to McIntosh.

"Basically, you're already not paying anything for the membership," he said, once the savings are netted out.

Versant declined to share GolfPass’ exact subscriber count, but the company has publicly said that the first quarter of 2026 was its highest ever for membership, a figure it credits partly to McIlroy’s continued involvement.

Changing booking behavior

McIntosh has been in golf technology long enough to watch the online-booking era unfold — as he noted, GolfNow and Fandango are both nearly 30-year-old brands. But the biggest shift, unsurprisingly, came after COVID.

"The demand for golf is unlike anything we've seen," he said. The pandemic pulled a wave of new players into the game, and unlike a lot of pandemic-era hobbies, golf’s popularity hasn’t receded, with 2026 shaping up to be one of the company’s best years yet.

Golf has also hit the mainstream in ways it hasn’t before. Think LeBron James appearing in golf commercials and Kevin Hart becoming a visible evangelist for the sport. The numbers are there too — according to the National Golf Foundation, 48.1 million Americans older than 6 played golf in some form in 2025, including 29.1 million who played on course and 19 million who played exclusively off-course.

That demand also has a downside. Online booking used to work like an OpenTable reservation — no card required, no charge until you showed up. That changed after golf courses became increasingly targeted by resale schemes. McIntosh pointed to a case in Los Angeles where two identical twin brothers ran a multi-course tee-time brokering operation before being hit with federal tax evasion charges for more than $1.1 million in unreported income, which required GolfNow to work with the city to implement new booking procedures in response.

While white-collar crime remains a minor problem, the broader industry fix has been to require deposits or full prepayment on tee times, a shift that cuts down on both no-shows and scalping, McIntosh said, but also marks a real change from how casual online booking used to feel.

Taking a Full Swing to close the loop

The Full Swing deal, announced on July 6, might be the clearest articulation yet of where McIntosh sees the business going. He framed Versant’s golf holdings as four core assets:

  • Golf Channel — the awareness layer: live tournament coverage, storytelling, credibility that markets everything else.
  • GolfNow — the participation layer: the online tee-time marketplace, plus roughly 200 field staff who work directly with golf courses on software and marketing.
  • GolfPass — the membership and improvement layer: content, loyalty, and booking benefits.
  • Full Swing — the new piece: simulators, launch monitors, and the performance data that comes with them.

"Our goal is to move from serving golf fans and tee-time customers to owning the golfer's improvement journey," McIntosh said — from learning about the game on Golf Channel, to booking and playing through GolfNow and GolfPass, to practicing and improving through Full Swing. Versant plans to build a single golfer profile across all four properties, with Full Swing's data feeding directly into it.

The deal also buys Versant a foothold in one of golf's fastest-growing categories: off-course entertainment. NGF estimates that the golf simulator market is growing roughly 9% a year and is currently at its record high. Full Swing's simulators are built into venues like Back Nine, an indoor golf concept that's gone from zero locations a few years ago to roughly 200 today — each with four Full Swing simulators.

The competitive position

Though McIntosh compared GolfNow to Amazon, the executive argues that GolfNow doesn’t really have a direct peer at scale. “GolfNow is really the only globally scaled tee-time marketplace that exists," he said — though he was candid about who it doesn't serve well: private-club members, or golfers who stick to one home course, get less value from the marketplace model.

Versant's hedge is to sell the infrastructure regardless of who books through it. In many cases, GolfNow supplies a course's website, mobile app, tee sheet, point-of-sale system and booking engine, meaning Versant's technology touches a booking even when it doesn't happen through the GolfNow marketplace itself.

McIntosh tied the Full Swing deal back to the strategy Versant CEO Mark Lazarus has been laying out publicly since the Comcast spinoff: build real depth in a handful of verticals through adjacent acquisitions, and use that depth to diversify revenue away from the legacy cable business. "The acquisition of Full Swing is just the latest example of finding adjacent businesses that complement our golf vertical," McIntosh said — with more, presumably, to come.

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Mollie Cahillane | mollie@bigswingmedia.news

Half of GolfNow’s booking revenue comes from GolfPass members who make up a fraction of its overall users. Versant built it that way on purpose, borrowing a page from Amazon Prime.

That’s Will McIntosh’s assessment. Versant’s president of digital platforms and ventures built the model when GolfPass launched in 2019 alongside partner Rory McIlroy. “It wasn’t so much about getting people to pay them the subscription fees for Prime,” he told Big Swing Media. “It’s about the psychology that changes in a consumer when they join a paid membership, and what that reinforces around their share of wallet.”

Seven years later, that bet is paying off. Six months after Versant’s spinoff from Comcast became official, the company is turning a sports vertical into a self-reinforcing digital business.

GolfPass and GolfNow sit inside Versant’s Platforms segment, which posted $192 million in revenue last quarter, up roughly 9%, with GolfNow cited as the primary driver. It’s a small piece of a company that also owns USA Network, CNBC, MS Now (formerly MSNBC) and Golf Channel. McIntosh’s portfolio, which also includes Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, is the clearest bet Versant has made on direct-to-consumer digital revenue outside of cable. This week, Versant also agreed to buy golf simulator company Full Swing for $530 million, its latest of more than 15 mergers and acquisitions under McIntosh.

‍The Prime playbook

Before 2019, what’s now Versant had a couple of different digital membership products, like Revolution Golf, which it acquired in 2017, and a loyalty program inside GolfNow called GolfNow VIP. When the team consolidated around a single membership strategy, McIntosh said two references helped shape the thinking: Amazon and Golf Channel’s own history.

"Golf Channel is arguably the most successful single sports network ever launched," McIntosh said of the network, founded with Arnold Palmer in the mid-'90s. "When we were thinking about a brand ambassador to be part of GolfPass, we aligned on Rory because we felt like he had a lot of the same qualities Arnold Palmer had." The pitch, internally, was something like: If you were reimagining Golf Channel for the streaming age, what would it be?

You can find the answer in GolfPass’ content library — legacy Golf Channel archives, daily produced instruction from top teachers, and original documentaries like a chronicle of McIlroy’s Boston TGL team and an ongoing series on the Cobbs Creek renovation in Philadelphia. Versant also partnered with who else but Amazon on a documentary marking McIlroy’s career Grand Slam at the Masters.

With content as the hook, bookings make the business. "The big driver is the value that it unlocks if you book your tee times through GolfNow," McIntosh said. Membership for the company’s top tier costs roughly $120 per year (a video-only version clocks in at $49 annually), and includes waived online service fees on most bookings, a multiplier on loyalty points, and a recently added early-access benefit for the best tee times at the best courses, a feature more than half the members have already used, according to McIntosh.

"Basically, you're already not paying anything for the membership," he said, once the savings are netted out.

Versant declined to share GolfPass’ exact subscriber count, but the company has publicly said that the first quarter of 2026 was its highest ever for membership, a figure it credits partly to McIlroy’s continued involvement.

Changing booking behavior

McIntosh has been in golf technology long enough to watch the online-booking era unfold — as he noted, GolfNow and Fandango are both nearly 30-year-old brands. But the biggest shift, unsurprisingly, came after COVID.

"The demand for golf is unlike anything we've seen," he said. The pandemic pulled a wave of new players into the game, and unlike a lot of pandemic-era hobbies, golf’s popularity hasn’t receded, with 2026 shaping up to be one of the company’s best years yet.

Golf has also hit the mainstream in ways it hasn’t before. Think LeBron James appearing in golf commercials and Kevin Hart becoming a visible evangelist for the sport. The numbers are there too — according to the National Golf Foundation, 48.1 million Americans older than 6 played golf in some form in 2025, including 29.1 million who played on course and 19 million who played exclusively off-course.

That demand also has a downside. Online booking used to work like an OpenTable reservation — no card required, no charge until you showed up. That changed after golf courses became increasingly targeted by resale schemes. McIntosh pointed to a case in Los Angeles where two identical twin brothers ran a multi-course tee-time brokering operation before being hit with federal tax evasion charges for more than $1.1 million in unreported income, which required GolfNow to work with the city to implement new booking procedures in response.

While white-collar crime remains a minor problem, the broader industry fix has been to require deposits or full prepayment on tee times, a shift that cuts down on both no-shows and scalping, McIntosh said, but also marks a real change from how casual online booking used to feel.

Taking a Full Swing to close the loop

The Full Swing deal, announced on July 6, might be the clearest articulation yet of where McIntosh sees the business going. He framed Versant’s golf holdings as four core assets:

  • Golf Channel — the awareness layer: live tournament coverage, storytelling, credibility that markets everything else.
  • GolfNow — the participation layer: the online tee-time marketplace, plus roughly 200 field staff who work directly with golf courses on software and marketing.
  • GolfPass — the membership and improvement layer: content, loyalty, and booking benefits.
  • Full Swing — the new piece: simulators, launch monitors, and the performance data that comes with them.

"Our goal is to move from serving golf fans and tee-time customers to owning the golfer's improvement journey," McIntosh said — from learning about the game on Golf Channel, to booking and playing through GolfNow and GolfPass, to practicing and improving through Full Swing. Versant plans to build a single golfer profile across all four properties, with Full Swing's data feeding directly into it.

The deal also buys Versant a foothold in one of golf's fastest-growing categories: off-course entertainment. NGF estimates that the golf simulator market is growing roughly 9% a year and is currently at its record high. Full Swing's simulators are built into venues like Back Nine, an indoor golf concept that's gone from zero locations a few years ago to roughly 200 today — each with four Full Swing simulators.

The competitive position

Though McIntosh compared GolfNow to Amazon, the executive argues that GolfNow doesn’t really have a direct peer at scale. “GolfNow is really the only globally scaled tee-time marketplace that exists," he said — though he was candid about who it doesn't serve well: private-club members, or golfers who stick to one home course, get less value from the marketplace model.

Versant's hedge is to sell the infrastructure regardless of who books through it. In many cases, GolfNow supplies a course's website, mobile app, tee sheet, point-of-sale system and booking engine, meaning Versant's technology touches a booking even when it doesn't happen through the GolfNow marketplace itself.

McIntosh tied the Full Swing deal back to the strategy Versant CEO Mark Lazarus has been laying out publicly since the Comcast spinoff: build real depth in a handful of verticals through adjacent acquisitions, and use that depth to diversify revenue away from the legacy cable business. "The acquisition of Full Swing is just the latest example of finding adjacent businesses that complement our golf vertical," McIntosh said — with more, presumably, to come.

Publicly Speaking

Editor’s Note: Essay originally published in the Met Golfer in June/July 2014. Thanks to the Met Golf Association. Golf participation numbers have increased dramatically - National Golf Foundation: As of February 2026 73% of courses are public (10,208) and 3767 are private and 417 total courses a part of the MGA, with 47% public (103) and 224 private.

I am a lucky man. Through friends, work, or friends I've made through work, I've had the pleasure and privilege of playing some of the world's great courses. I say that shaking my head, because I grew up playing mostly public course golf. I own no "muni" records or distinctions – although I did once hit my boss with an approach shot as he was putting out – but those times are among some of my favorites, in or out of the game.

According to the National Golf Foundation, there are nearly three times as many public golf facilities in America as there are private ones: 11,505 public, 4,011 private as of January 1, 2014. It's a very different situation in the Met Area: The ratio for facilities that belong to the MGA is much smaller, with 324 public clubs (with and without real estate) compared to 246 private ones.

For me, growing up and as a young adult, Maple Moor in White Plains was the place to play. Opened in 1927, it is the oldest of Westchester's municipal courses, and the par five third hole so vexed me that I once wrote a newspaper column about how much I hated it.

Put your bag on a pull- or push-cart and get in touch with the soul of the game.

But the memory of shaking hands on the first tee with someone I'd never met, then spending the next four and a half hours (ok, probably more like five and a half hours) getting to know them, is so uniquely public golf: that first tee stranger who becomes an 18th green friend.I remember spending a summer on Eastern Long Island, home to so many legendary and pedigreed private clubs, but my golf that summer was played entirely at a public track: Montauk Downs, the Robert Trent Jones-designed gem at the tip of the island, which is owned and operated by New York State. The course back then was like a beautiful woman in a tattered dress: breathtaking, but not putting its best foot forward. Nevertheless, just like with the woman in the worn dress, you'd still brag the next day about the "company you kept."

Unless you planned ahead (never my strong suit; ask my wife), the easiest – actually only – way to get on the Downs was as a single. So I met three lifers from the local Coast Guard station. We played, and then they took me to a bar I must have blindly driven past a hundred times before. We drank beer, told lies, and ate fried clams. In the bright light of day, my nautical friends and I were just ships passing in the night, but I'll never forget that day. All these years later it reminds me of the unexpected gifts that golf can give you.

Golf is a hard and expensive business. Private clubs have their struggles, but they also have assessments, dues increases, and the initiation fees of new members to provide the wherewithal to keep their operations going. Munis and independently run public courses have no such options. They are businesses that depend on what we are often told is a shrinking client base. And good luck in these times convincing a municipality to increase funding to anything – let alone a golf course.

So in order to survive, public golf facilities must be the ultimate examples of Darwinism.

Maybe, like me, you've been lucky. Maybe you've got more than a few logoed shirts from "wow" tracks tucked away somewhere in your closet. That's nice, but how about this: How about we all go play a few rounds at a public track? Maybe it's not all perfect: The tees are a little irregular, the greens might have some bumps, and not everybody rakes the bunkers. So what? Put your bag on a pull- or push-cart, and get in touch with the soul of the game and a million memories. Me? I'm heading back to Maple Moor. Can't wait to see who I'll meet on the first tee. Maybe I'll even par the third.

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