It’s not easy being Singletrack. Please help.

Done. When do I get my blue tick?

Now we know how many paying subscribers.
How many free members are there?

It’s not easy being anything these days! The only way to survive is to adapt, not just charge more for the same thing.

Apologies if any of the following sounds harsh, but if anybody external and independent with commercial acumen looked at this, they would probably say the same thing.

We all love this site and the support that it provides through good times and bad times, but these requests are becoming more frequent and the place has more of a whiff of a charity than a business.

There are loads of good web only bike sites that don’t have the added burden or producing a mag. As emotional as it is, surely the time has come to review the business model and whether it can actually support as many employees as it does? Let’s exclude the emotion and focus on STW as a business as well as a bike hub. The writing is on the wall for printed media guys – evolve or die.

Saddens me, but that’s the harsh reality of running a business. I have worked in a number of business facing a similar existential challenge and the questions is ultimately ‘would enough people to keep you running miss you if you weren’t there tomorrow to keep you alive’? If not, change the model so that enough people do care to keep you running. The web is full of the same stories – declining sales in the bikes industry, cost of living, death of printed media. You can only swim against the tide for so long.

I’ve just tried to up mine but it looks like in addition to the increase it want to charge me a sign up fee. is that correct

It would be good to know the percentage of Full/Digital/free members

@tracey The so called ‘sign up fee’ (Built in – horrible term) IS the reconciliation for the rest of your membership.

There are roughly twice as many print members as digital only – although everyone gets digital.

Evolve or die – whatever the cause, the same thing applies (but surely print can’t be helping – the mag and content doesn’t come for free and print media circulation isn’t exactly on the up). The mag might be a revenue generator and arguably fundamental to the STW brand, but if it didn’t exist you could reduce your overall overheads? Plus, look at BearGrease’s comment below. Your mag is only as good as the last edition and keeping it relevant in a world where news is here one second and gone the next is increasingly difficult.

A community of 6,000 paying subscribers + non-paying traffic that generates ad revenue generates income X. Costs = Y (where Y must be < X). If that isn’t true, something has to change. Getting more from the paying community of 6,000 feels like a sticking plaster cure when the real issue is an over reliance on a dwindling and increasingly regulated pot of ad revenue. You have to fight harder for the big pot of money (advertising), not rely on a small group of dedicated loyalists (or if you do, reduce your costs accordingly). You can’t afford to run a multi-channel business on niche, specialist revenues.

Increasing X is an increasingly difficult task for any industry right now as the tide is falling. Making money when the tide is rising is relatively easy. Unfortunately the cost base has to be reviewed if there isn’t a sustainable way to increase the top line. That’s the long and short of it. No emotion, whatever is unaffordable will drag you under. No pet projects, no emotional decisions. The world is littered with failed passion projects that we really loved by their creators but didn’t work commercially.

Sounds doom and gloom, but it isn’t. The future may not look like the past, but there is a strong future for STW given the demand for its product, albeit that demand might not be quite as healthy as it once was. However doing the same things and charging more for them when there is decreasing demand is a fool’s paradise.

Take a look at the Pinkbike model. Their traffic generator is YouTube. Their content generates revenue via YouTube as well as directing traffic towards their site. YouTube generates more impressions than the printed media ever will, thus providing a more attractive place for advertisers. You need to get more eyes on the site to be more competitive as a place to advertise. To use an old-school example here’s no point doing this through a sandwich board when you competition are on TV!

I think there’s still a market for specialist print publications*.

The only printed magazine I subscribe to is Motorsport Magazine (£5.50/month) as it adds so much more than the web motorsport media.

The only reason I don’t have print STW is because I don’t ride anymore.

I have seen some local free advertising mags go to the wall recently though. The advertisers are still there but print costs have rocketed so they’re no longer viable.

*no – not that sort, that really has been killed off by the web! 🙂

Take a look at the Pinkbike model.

Singletrack has managed to stay independent and focused on original content, where as Pinkbike has been consumed by Outside and relies on recycling old content from their other “channels” and publishing outside PR pieces. Now, who should be looking at whose model…?

Oof, some tough love responses on here.

The old cozzy livs is hitting us all and I can’t put my hand in my pocket, sorry 🙁

Take a look at the Pinkbike model. Their traffic generator is YouTube.

It’s easy to guess the problems with someone else’s business and say to fix them by “pivoting to video” (cheeky quote from Succession there), but PB has BY FAR the biggest audience in MTB media (and arguably the most-coherent editorial offering). Thus they’ll have advertisers beating down their door. YT will be one of their revenue streams but it’ll be a piece of the puzzle, not the magic formula for their success.

I dunno if you work in media Solarider but I did many years in print & digital, and I got out of editorial because it was so insecure. FB and Google were hoovering up all the advertising money and it always ended up with employers cutting costs (aka jobs).

If there was a simple answer that didn’t involve cutting staff then I’m sure Mark & co would be doing it already. Telling him to make people redundant is a bit distaseful IMO.

I would never hold Pinkbike up as a model of quality

You should.

They are pretty much the best in the biz, unless you favour print-style long-form features or the embittered ramblings of NSMB.

Posted without comment.

That’s right Ped.

After years of being a subscriber, I had to make some tough decisions about renewing this year. STW wasn’t the only mag that I dropped. I kept Cyclist but that’s it because it was ultimately more relevant to me than Singletrack, but STW is far better than Cyclist as a website (surely that is quite telling?).

Does me not being a subscriber somehow diminish the validity of my responses or make me somehow less entitled to post? Do you also subscribe to the argument that because cyclists don’t pay road tax they shouldn’t use it? It’s a remarkably similar reasoning. Does my decision not to subscribe for financial reasons somehow exclude me from still wanting to see STW thrive?

Making judgements about the validity of an opinion when you have no insight into the financial reason for not subscribing is unfortunately neither big nor clever and certainly won’t help the very real challenge that clearly faces STW. Am I somehow meant to put the financial needs of my family bhind the future of STW, or otherwise retreat from the site and never post again? Apologies if I missed something in the small print about the benefits of being a subscriber and the indirect cost of ending a subscription. If you want the site to be some sort of exclusive club for subscribers only, then the 6,000 users will not be enough to keep it afloat for sure.

I would argue that the contribution that I make to the traffic to this site through my regular visits and consumption of the advertising is of equal value to my subscription since it generates advertising value. Simply being here, being active and consuming media helps the business to generate revenue. If you aren’t familiar with that model, hopefully it gives you some insight into how the business works. Do you think that the advert that you are probably looking at right now doesn’t help to fund the site, or that the value that it generates is directly proportionate to the number of times it is seen? The world of advertising is a cynical cruel world, but make no mistake, you are part of it and your very presence here is valuable to somebody whether you subscribe or not.

How does website advertising work now? Is it still the old way of you only get money if someone clicks on the advert? Or are sites paid just for displaying them?

It’s a really complicated balance of algorithms, but what matters is firstly how many visitors there are to the site who have the opportunity to see (OTS) the ad (which is itself valuable) and the number of those visitors that actually click on the ad (the click thru rate or CTR).

Sites that can deliver a high OTS of the right demographic (and unfortunately middle aged dentists are more valuable than younger students in this respect because of their disposable income) have a head start. They can further enhance their value by their CTR.

Therefore what matters to STW is generating enough traffic to the site in order to generate OTS revenue, and hopefully generating a high CTR both in % and absolute numbers, which is where a high volume of visitors (whether they are subscribers or not Ped) is valuable as a starting point and where the printed mag is not as effective at driving traffic as some of the other options out there (YouTube for example, hence the Pinkbike reference).

I know STW is relevant to our hobbies, but it aint a charity, it is a business, and whilst we might not like to see it that way, it has to survive in a harsh and competitive world.

There are many other ways of generating advertising revenue, but these are the biggest and simplest to explain.

It is clear from the article linked by Charlie that the team at STW are throwing everything at this problem, and chapeau to that. I just hope it is enough, but if not there are still things that can be done.

Once upon a time simply viewing ads was enough to generate revenue. Now the pendulum has swung away from Pay Per View to Pay Per Click. The programmatic system pays us a eCPM rate. Ie effective rate per 1000 views but this is misleading. It appears that we get paid for the views but in reality the eCPM would be zero if no ads were clicked. Typical eCPM rates in this sector are around $0.7 CPM for programmatic ads. Much higher for direct sold ads from the bike industry and not through an ad network. so it takes 1000 impressions of an ad to generate us $0.7. That’s why you see more than one ad on a page. A year ago that rate was much higher.

We currently deliver around 3 million page impressions/month. For some scale.

despite what Solar keeps saying the return per reader is way way higher for print. It’s just that print comes with bigger overheads.

The problem isn’t print. It’s actually much more effective than digital advertising/user.

I just subbed as a full Print member, one thing that isn’t clear is do I get the current Printed issue or do I have to wait until April for that to start?

And, fix the the hard paywall, so I can share a limited number of articles per month and grow your audience for you. (“It’s really great content, but you’ll have to trust me on that and pay first” isn’t a viable growth strategy)

A bit like this:

For STW to say yes to that question would be almost fraud as a beneficiary of those clicks, but I can say it – YES!

I don’t really want to give STW any more money as I don’t read the mag so my digital subscription fee is basically just an ad blocker service, but I have just logged out and clicked on five ads. If it’s gonna help, I’ll do it again every now and then.

I only renewed a couple of weeks ago as well. TBH I was struggling to justify it, but decided ad free is a better experience.

If I understand Mark’s most recent post correctly, the ad revenue generation of $0.7 per 1000 impressions multiplied by 3 million impressions per month converts to $2100/month which, using forex rate of 1.15 is c£1830/month.

This, I think, means that it takes 41,000 impressions to generate £25 – which is the cost of an annual digital only subscription; that’s 1367 impressions/day – each and every day.

I asked earlier how many free members there are; Tracey also asked the same.
Any answer?

This is now the third time that Mark and co have made a direct appeal.
That should send out a very clear message.