It’s not easy being Singletrack. Please help.

Who do you think should pay for hosting/managing that forum?

We all should. I do. Although Mark doesn’t describe it as such, but I pay £0 for a digital magazine and £25 a year for the forum.

I love this place and what it stands for.

@BruceWee as a sample of one I would if I thought it would help. Actually, I like the whole lack of tracking thing so I wouldn’t need much convincing.

Who do you think should pay for hosting/managing that forum?

Might as well paraphrase weeksy since he put it so well.

We all should. I do. Although Mark doesn’t describe it as such, but I pay £0 for a paper magazine and £40 a year for the forum.

( apologies if it’s not 40 quid. I don’t actually know)

We all should. I do. Although Mark doesn’t describe it as such, but I pay £0 for a digital magazine and £25 a year for the forum.

I love this place and what it stands for.

+1 pretty much same for me.

the content becomes repetetive (beginners guide to… how to …

carve gybe / waterstart

jump / ride roots etc.).

Been there… 😀

When it comes to bike magazines in general, are they all dying a death?

It would be interesting to see what the circulation figures are for some of the magazines, especially things like Singletrack where they aren’t, I don’t think, even available in normal newsagents etc.

I’d hazard a guess that the magazine industry as a whole is circling the drain and won’t be around in it’s current form for a great deal longer.

I am a recent convert from free member to paying subscriber- I stopped reading the magazine years ago as I’ve never really found the writing style to my liking. I never look at the main site and now pay for the forum purely because it is a great resource for advice on bike maintenance, training and races/events. I also find the chat about pro cycling entertaining too and usually there are some long/involved threads about the big grand tours when they are on.

In many ways I’m not the target market as I gave up mountain biking years ago and only road ride and trail run now and I wouldn’t say I’m particularly interested in gravel riding or bike packing.

But, as much as I love cycling I sometimes wonder how much can really be said about it as an activity outside of the competitive part of it. I buy a bike on average about once every 8 years so bike reviews are meaningless to me for 7.9 years out of every 8. Routes in the UK are well established- especially mountain bike routes that can legally be published…even I could advise someone on a classic peak district route and I’ve not ridden a bridleway since 2009. Like most people I know who are into cycling I don’t go on multiple cycling holidays a year to far flung sunny countries following a local guide around, so articles about riding in Andorra or Croatia or something are of limited value really.

I still buy the paper copy of Cycling Weekly as I can catch up on some pro cycling news and also I find the domestic competitive news interesting- the focus in general seems to be on things that are more local and relatable to me, local TTs, Hill Climbs and CX racing, club runs, events that I might actually enter, rides I might actually do.

I might be totally wrong here but is it fair to say most people own one bike (maybe 2) and rarely exchange it, ride local to them and perhaps go abroad on a cycling specific holiday maybe occasionally but probably rarely? The sportives or events the enter most likely will be within a 3 hour drive of where they live?

I’m not sure if STW is guilty of any of the above as I haven’t read it in years but most cycling media seems to be like that to me and it is fairly predictable/tired after a while. I always thought Cyclist magazine offered some different/insightful articles compared to the rest but there’s still only so many “Big Ride in Sunny and Faraway Country [x]” that can hold my interest and it is inevitably really expensive now.

Yeah I know, wrong place to pose that question probably 😂

Yeah I know, wrong place to pose that question probably

I do get your point though. A lot of riding of ‘us’ is not in far flung places.. but then again, magazines are a bit of ‘social dreaming’ aren’t they ? The trip to Peru you’ll never do, the bikepacking in the Andes that are beyond our reach..

Rather than, a trip round Ladybower reservoir on a gravel bike… which lets face it, won’t be that exciting to read.

we’re all different though of course, i’d love to read about (if i read magazines) how Charlie went to BPW and nailed a red, ate a burger and experienced Merthyr on a Friday night… but i doubt many others would. In the same way, an article about someone roughing it in the Cairngorns, well, it doesn’t do a lot for me.

From an exceptionally biased perspective, a racing series with a youngster racing Fort William, now that i’d read 😉 😉

Is it possible that the audience for the mag and the audience for the forum are actually pretty different?

At the risk of rambling and not adding anything: I very rarely buy bikes (never new ones) and have no interest in racing etc. I think I might have subscribed to the mag one year ages ago but let it drop. I would probably pay for forum membership now that I know it’s useful…but I tend to drift in and out to avoid getting bogged down in forum politics

so articles about riding in Andorra or Croatia or something are of limited value really

Tbf travel writing (like food reviewing, mayne even top end gear reviewing) isn’t solely to be “practical”. Sometimes it is escapism. There are plenty of people that read supercar mags but will never buy a new car, who read Jay Rayner but don’t go to 5* restaurants etc.

YouTube is much harder to make money from than people think. The subscriber numbers being talked about here wouldn’t solve the problem

https://influencermarketinghub.com/youtube-money-calculator/

They are of course missing an open goal on the marketing front…

…they need to do a Happy Valley Special! Get Sarah Lancashire owt in them there hills and spam social media with it! Do a cycle route of popular murder spots. Boom – millions of hits! They’ve probably even filmed in Tod! 🤣

we’re all different though of course, i’d love to read about (if i read magazines) how Charlie went to BPW and nailed a red, ate a burger and experienced Merthyr on a Friday night… but i doubt many others would. In the same way, an article about someone roughing it in the Cairngorns, well, it doesn’t do a lot for me.

I won’t bother cut n paste reversing the two examples in the text above, but basically this. We all have slightly ( very?) different MTB interests and its physically impossible for a finite set of writers to appeal to all of them all of the time. Loads of the STW articles are good, but the reality is that they’re only of interest to a subset of the pop.
Hannah ( or someone) keeps asking what we DO want to hear about. This is a commendable approach but unfortunately doomed to failure because there is no ” collective we” when it comes to the STW readership.
Some people, quite rightly, want to read about amazing adventures in the Cairngorms.
Some people, again quite rightly, want to read about amazing techie gnarr in the lake district*
Some people, believe it or not, want to read about which riders are riding for which teams and who is winning what races. **
Some people apparently want to read about ebikes costing over a month’s salary.
Some complete weirdos even want to read general articles about bike maintenance which isn’t directly related to the exact job they’re doing at that point in time ( no I don’t believe it either 🙂 )
Some people even want to hear about gravel routes in the south of England ( shudders)

The point is that STW can no more fill the magazine with what interests everyone than they could roll a pair of dice and get a double six and a double five and a double…. every single throw.
But the forum contains all that info, and with the power of Google we can find the bit we’re interested in.

* and of course the other issue is that you’re not allowed to write articles about FBWs 😉
** W08 excepted of course. Even I want to hear those results.

Thinking a bit further, IF the magazine had an amazing search facility, where I could find the article in issues 35 about slogging around Glen Tilt in a blizzard, and Weeksy could find the review in issue78 of the ginormous Park Tools tool chest, THAT would be something. There must be shitloads of stuff in the back catalog that would interest people if they can find it.

Some YouTube info for you.

This

1.2 million views. Listed on IMDB and gets a massive review score. It’s taken a few years to get to that number of course. But total earned revenue from Youtube = £3585.25

So about the equivalent of 100 full members over the same time period. So considering that documentary was made in 2016 a rate of 16 new members a year. That doc had a budget of £30k IIRC which we covered via sponsors. That revenue above is our profit.

For the record the calculated CPM rate of £2.92 (1000 viewers = £2.92 in revenue) is pretty typical for a sports niche. The highest paying niche on YT is finance with a typical CPM in excess of £25.

1.2m views is a tiny number. For comparison BCPOV which I see mentioned here as one people enjoy had 835,000 in the last 30 days. https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/bcpov

Compared to 30,000 for this mag’s channel https://socialblade.com/youtube/c/singletrack

YouTube is all about frequency and building a subscriber base rather than 1 off films

Cranked has 1 employee

Cranked has 1 employee

and he does a damn good job. But you don’t just produce a paper mag, you have much more than that

Me (back from the dead)!

Mark – I really think you are missing the point, and if I might be so bold you are over estimating the quality and appeal of your content. As a bike geek, I loved this film (but only once – it’s not on my repeat play list). Long, high production value (and expensive) pieces like this one which are published rarely and only really marketed to the STW loyalists (there’s a preaching to the converted theme here!) are very different to the short, topical, bite-sized YT articles published on a daily basis that drive traffic, interest and just the sense of community that you are trying to nurture. Just look at the average viewer numbers for the 10 minute max popcorn content from other YT producers. Far higher than your masterpiece.

So you published a film lasting almost 70 minutes (which in modern terms is a fair commitment of time given that Tik Tok have established that the average millennial’s attention span is 3.8 seconds) 7 years ago and on that basis you have ruled out YT (a channel which your competitors use on a daily basis to drive content, traffic and revenue)? That’s like saying I tried piano once and I couldn’t play Mozart’s piano concerto within the hour so clearly piano is a rubbish instrument.

At the risk of looking like I have swallowed a management consultancy thesaurus, you need to build a multi-channel ecosystem. Not purely for the revenue (something I thought you were trying to free yourself from anyway), but because you need more people to be interested in what you do. You need to create a virtuous circle of multi-channel content where you maximise your audience reach. Daily, short burst relevant content mixed with longer editorial style published across VOD, print, social and web. YT might not be a revenue generator, but it’s a great platform to get the message out there as a means of driving awareness and traffic to STW. You are honestly deluded if you think it will drive more magazine subscriptions though. How many people need to tell you the same thing?!

I fear that there is a consensus of feedback from just the people that you are trying to target and a consensus of defensiveness from your team. If your model is working so well, why have you extended the begging bowl for the second time?

Keep doing the same thing in the same way and see how that works for you. Me personally, I would chose to take onboard the feedback, evolve and thrive. Whether you have the team, the content or the attitude to do that is the big question.

There has been quite a bit of chat about whether your content is broad enough to reach anything more than 6k people, many of which it appears only subscribe out of kindness to pay for the forum and wouldn’t really miss the mag if it wasn’t here tomorrow.

I appreciate a lot of this thread has burst your bubble with regards to what you think your baby is all about, but burst it you must. Listen to what people are taking the time to tell you about their usage and needs and get yourself off the 20th century coolaid. You can argue all day that they are all wrong, but your competitors clearly don’t think so, and the readers that you are trying to attract don’t either based on this thread.

Being analogue in a digital world hasn’t worked for too many of your peer group, but maybe you know something that nobody else does…….the general consensus of posts in this thread tell me you might be a little out of touch with your audience.

[ classifieds, forum]…
What you have now is not the best, but then that’s in the plan too. Unfortunately with such limited resources we can’t make the instant fixes that you all clearly wish we could – and many of you wonder why the F… we don’t. It takes time and money to run

I think this is the point that I’m trying to make, and I think one or two others as well.

Stop wasting the money I give you for the forum on writing articles that I have no interest in. Spend it on fixing the forum.

the general consensus of posts in this thread tell me you might be a little out of touch with your audience.

My inbox says otherwise I’m afraid. There is certainly strong feeling here and yours is one of the strongest. But I still do not agree with your view. I realise i’m in a privileged position of being able to see the full picture and I have a lot of empathy for your opinions – but it’s not the reality of the modern publishing sphere. I’m not a dinosaur hanging on to the past by any stretch of the imagination – I’d never generally put this here as it makes me sound completely lost up my own arse but I am booked to speak at 2 national publishing conferences on a number of the topics mentioned in this thread. I’ve spoken at quite a few others in the past too. I have form in this field and 22 years of experience (Nope, that does make me sound like a stuck up arse). In that time many of our competitors have fallen away, but we remain and as I just said above, Singletrack has a pretty safe future. The question is what shape that will take – My one singular goal is that future contains all the staff we currently have – that’s it!

Maybe you and others are right. Maybe I should just downsize and make some staff cuts (I’m buggered as to where I’d make those cuts mind without making things a lot worse) – but well. I’m just not going to do that. That could bring things crashing down. That’s a risk. But I’m taking that risk. I’m happy with the risk I’m taking and yes, it’s a hill I’m prepared to die on.

You may well get a lot of what you have said we should do in the future – like I said a lot of what you have said appears on the surface to be obvious and easily done. I know what is actually easy to do and is possible. I know what is a sound revenue stream to expend the limited resources we have on chasing. I guess we are going to have to see what happens over the coming months and years. I’m pretty sure if I screw this plan up there will be plenty of people lining up to tell me I was wrong and they were right all along. If we are still here in a year and the changes we want to happen happen, I don’t suppose we’ll hear much though.