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Large part of why I renewed this year is because I want you to still be around, rather than the actual magazine. You're a bit of an odd bunch, but I like you and what you do.
I don't really understand (literally that; rather than being suspicious of) what you do with 12 people. I presume you aren't all full time, given the amount of content produced and the amount of content from guest writers in the mag and site.
To get more ad or affiliate clicks that result in purchases, perhaps you could focus on quality content like buyer's guides with links to buy. How often do we get threads in the form asking about what tyres, jackets, lights. It needs to be quality but also comprehensive, can't just be the last 5 tyres you happen to have done a full review of while leaving out other popular choices. You could also do kit check guides for particular activities or adventures, for newcomers or experienced people trying new things. Or tag it onto classic rides and other features, what kit did you use etc. Just bought my first proper MTB, what do I need? Going to a bike park for the first time, doing that southern long distance ride in a day, going up a Munro with a bike, refreshing your oldish bike... there is tons of stuff people want to do on bikes for which they need stuff/services.
Many people posted ideas here https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/a-members-forum/ about ideas of things you could do, that might attract or retain subscribers, or could be additional services.
130k registered user a/cs of whom 6k are paying subscribers; that’s 4.6%.
That's not 130k active users though.
I don’t really understand (literally that; rather than being suspicious of) what you do with 12 people
I run a business with a $30m turnover with 7 people. It's hard not to sound a bit judgmental, but 12 people for your turnover does sound like a lot of squeeze for not much juice and given your turnover I am guessing none of you are doing this to fund your private Caribbean island or massive yacht?
Reading between the lines of your P&L, your revenue sources seem to be subscriptions and advertising. Your subscriptions are static at best (particularly if you don't raise prices) and your ad revenue is declining. Your costs are mainly people and production. People costs must be increasing by a small amount and your production costs are seemingly increasing at 20% over the last 18 months. There's no way to sugar coat it - that is not a viable business model so you need to make some tough choices. Increasing your revenue when the bike industry is in decline and there is a cost of living crisis will be doubly difficult.
You have to charge more for your product and cut costs or you won't survive. I know that doesn't sit well with you, but that's the situation.
Think I need to ignore this thread for a while. I am beginning to sound critical rather than constructive and my intention couldn't be further from that. But if you raise a flag that you are in trouble and ask for donations, I guess you need to be prepared for some well intentioned advice too. Hopefully at least some of it resonates and gets you asking the right questions. I love your passion and I admire your principles but you might have to test your commitment to all of them if you are to achieve your goals. The question is which are fundamental to you, and which you might compromise in order to achieve your long term ambition to build a great community, keep people employed and enjoy the cycling lifestyle.
Can you poach Jo Burt from MBUK?* I’ve always thought his style would suit STW better.
And then you can give away a free key ring! 😀
(* I don’t even know if Mint Sauce is still in MBUK!)
I run a business with a $30m turnover with 7 people
The basic rule of thumb always used to be £100k turnover for every employee - think it’s more like £120k per employee now. For an average salary.
My digital subs price is £20, last renewed in December. If the current price is £25, I'm happy to match that. STW need to make sure paying customers pay the current rate - I exchanged a few emails with subs a while back, there was a policy of keeping subscribers on their sign-up rate, but this may have been changed since.
I think more on-line only content could increase traffic and sign-ups, maybe simpler articles (tyre group tests...? ☺️) that don't sit well in the print mag. Maybe a really cheap sub for this stuff, without magazine article access. Just a few thoughts.
I value the site, but it needs to be commercially viable without donations. I signed up for issue 1 via the Gofar forum before the magazine existed to help get it off the ground - I'm glad I did. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
sola – you say you’ve cancelled your subscription for financial reasons and/but are running a $30 million annual t/o company?
1) Running it for somebody else and owning it are 2 very different things! We invest a lot in the brand, we pay a large corporate overhead and make a decent profit for somebody else!
2) Cancelling something for financial reasons and not being able to afford it are also 2 very different things. 3 magazine subscriptions (Rouleur, STW and Cranked) used to cost over £200 a year and I didn't feel like I was getting £200 a year of enjoyment vs what I could do with that money for my son. It's the cost of his swimming club for a year as an example. He gets more out of that than he would out of my magazine subscription, and I get more enjoyment from seeing him progress than reading about somebody else's ride or a product review that I can get free anywhere on the web. I also felt that it was wrong to subscribe when most of the mag was subsequently made available online within days of the publication date anyway.
Your comment raises a whole different philosophical debate about value for money and affordability. Let's not go there right now! Since you don't know my financial position, don't be too quick to judge!
Sorry for the random ask without having a rummage, but is there still the ‘donate to STW’ thing from covid times? If so, is there an option for a monthly chuck in?
RM.
I’ve been buying Singletrack from the beginning and later as a member I carried on buying even after having to cut other magazines. The quality of the magazine is superb, the website is fun and informative, with the occasional glitch! I think the forum is different from others in that the chat forum is so informative in so many ways - legal advice, building advice, political views, appeals for help with health (mental and physical), wildlife and gardening, travel advice and just a wonderful community of people who mostly rub along and try and help people.
I don’t know how the number of staff could be cut as the amount of content produced, magazine, podcasts, articles and product tests etc would appear to be disproportionate!
I shall increase my subscription and buy some stuff from the shop. I’ll not be buying one of the recycled belts however, as the one I have is the only belt I have that isn’t too tight. It stretches throughout the day and I run out of holes whilst my trousers fall down! All my other belts run out of holes in the other direction…
Good luck you all and if it helps clicking on ads just let us know, I’ll have a couple of days of not logging in.
Don’t bother clicking the ads unless you really want to visit the advertiser. Clicking our affiliate links in articles and even posting links to deals you spot for the benefit of others is by far the best thing you can do. The ad supported model (programmatic at least) is what we are trying to pivot away from.
I’m thinking aloud
Is there a “click through to buy” area. If you got a % of all my wiggle purchases that would increase the revenue
Could there be a temporary subscriber button?
You click it and then click a button to pay say a pound via PayPal. That converts your membership to subscriber for 3 days. But you can only do that 3 times per year. Or each time you click it the cost doubles or the time halves.
Maybe only full subscribers can use the word “tyres” in the title of a thread?
Could there be a subscriber tyre review area?
There is a limit to how often you can post a question or reply per month, if you’re not a paid member?
You can’t ask Scotroutes a question if you’re not a subscriber?
I may have been drinking
I'm not going to go over the grounds that others have about cutting costs or increasing prices because there isn't much to say but in that article it's quite noticeable that existing subscribers are being asked to donate more (not unreasonable) but at the same time new subscribers are getting a 50% discount. At that rate you have to be making a loss on paper subscription sign ups. I get the point made about ongoing benefit but if things are so tight you're asking for donations to support then it doesn't seem like you are in a position to support a loss making offer, take your profit off it so you break even, fair enough but you're making a real term loss. You don't want to win bad business and that looks like it is, how many years at full price do you need to make up the loss you will have incurred?
I don't know whether you break down STW into cost centres but given you're referring to turnover generated by print and digital rather than profit I assume you don't. If you don't then it sounds like you're in a position where you need to. The print side may well generate more turnover but the associated costs will be way higher than the online. Only once you've got a handle on that and the fixed/variable opex splits for print and digital respectively you can make a decent assessment of where to go with aiming to increase membership.
The suggestion of a forum only membership seems sensible, you'd have very minimal increase in associated overheads so any income is nearly all margin and you might pick up existing users asking for the service. Assuming there is no uplift on the costs as the production staff are fixed then digital subscribers is good but you need to generate new subscribers that already have access to that option. Increasing print sign ups seem like the least effective position as any income comes with an associated overheads.
A forum only membership is really not a solution.
Forum only membership?
I posted about this on the other thread - or think I did!
Full price digital only is £25pa; I cannot see anything less than that making commercial sense - and even that is predicated on there being minimal/no set up and maintenance costs for a forum only option.
To be blunt, the issue is converting free members into paying subscribers.
Mark & co have an established membership/renewal structure; it's all about pumping more volume through it.
I'm all in favour of SMEs, have a long standing affinity with print media and like/admire Singletrack so...when Mark made his first appeal, I donated; second appeal, same again and also set-up monthly standing order.
It might have been more cost effective to become a life member!
One thought - canvas the membership to understand what they would buy from the merch shop, if only Charlie stocked it!
Market research, supply chain, logistics, pricing: there you go, you said you wanted and we can deliver; please pay non-refundable deposit of £nnn before we order as no deposit means no order.
Putting one's c**k on the block, so to speak.
Anyway, enough from me; others have said they're on the beer so...it's time I was!
The suggestion of a forum only membership seems sensible, you’d have very minimal increase in associated overheads so any income is nearly all margin and you might pick up existing users asking for the service. Assuming there is no uplift on the costs as the production staff are fixed then digital subscribers is good but you need to generate new subscribers that already have access to that option. Increasing print sign ups seem like the least effective position as any income comes with an associated overheads.
My hunch is that there are 2 mistakes here
Firstly, as I’ve said before, a forum only subscription isn’t cheaper. It cost nothing or next to nothing let some one down load the magazine and it generates ad revenue for the magazine.
I’m also fairly sure that the extra cost of a print subscription more than pays for the cost of printing and delivery
Why is there no option to pay monthly? If a digital sub is £2.08 per month, I'd happily pay £2.50 or £3 a month, but actually monthly rather than annually.
I know that £30 isn't much to pay out but £2.50 a month is a lot less....
For a full paper sub a monthly fee is even nicer than £50 or £60 as it seems it needs to be.
£45 a year for the magazine
£25 a year for digital
£5 a month for digital
Is there a reason that the monthly option is so much more per year? Do people join for a month, when buying a bike, read all the reviews and leave?
Take a leaf out of New Scientist's book when you offer subs. (Not saying cost, but their offerings - they don't do their offerings like that for no reason - there's science behind it 🙂 )
Anyway. It's about time I subbed, especially given the amount of time I'm spending effing about on the forum. I can't take the o/h out for a meal and a drink for 45 quid and that's transient and lasts for an evening.
All the people on here buy new tyres regularly. Just sayin'.
ads - there is an option to pay monthly for digital only access at £4.99.
My post was clear that the annual digital sub of £25 equates to £2.08/month.
ampthill - I would suggest that annualising the monthly option is irrelevant; as with many/most subscription models, the pricing is always structured to encourage long(er) term commitment - it provides some financial certainty and facilitates medium term planning with some confidence.
Back to CNN, beer and wine.
You're supposed to be running a business, but this is more like begging. (Hint - dogs, or pictures of dogs will increase your take.)
I subscribed for quite a few years previously on the basis that I found the content interesting and entertaining and thought that should support the site in the hope that it would grow and improve.
Nothing changed - the forum software continues to be a bizzare, home-brew affair, lacking in almost all of the features that pretty much every other, popular internet forum has.
As a result, I chose not to renew my subscription a couple of years ago.
Since then, the forum (& classifieds ) have become even clunkier and idiosyncratic (almost unusable in some browsers) and I'm convinced that the number of regular users and consequently the breadth and volume of postings has suffered because of this.
IMHO It's time to ditch the home-brew approach and the overhead required just to keep it rolling, let alone modify or "improve" it, just to reach the standard functionality of every other mainstream forum out there (I have previously offered MIG welding, Motorhome Fun & The Fretboard as exemplars). Park the content of this forum as an accessible archive somewhere and move on (I can't even underline the words 'move on' in this poxy editor!) - you can still integrate a 3rd party forum software into the rest of the site.
I would pay a 'forum only' membership (say £10/year) *if* the forum user experience was up to par.
I've subscribed again in response to the blatant begging, but won't be renewing again unless things improve. If the business won't support 12 people, you need to grow it until it will (hint - listen to the feedback!), or reduce the number of people - sorry, but that's business.
Begging isn't a long term model IMHO.
Motorhome Fun? In my experience it was anything but. Some Landrover sites when I owned one some years ago were also quite nasty places to be and full of wrong information. STW is clunky (I’m not sure what that means) but comfy.
Maybe against the general grain of the comments on this thread (but I think in line with Mark's points) I as a middle aged reader and many years subscriber to the mag (with very luckily some disposable income still despite the clusterfhuck management of the economy by this Gov) think the paper mag is the cornerstone of the business. Lose the paper mag and the whole foundations fall apart. Ditch the mag at your peril.
It REALLY doesn't have to be the race to the bottom that some are prescribing.
Keep up the good work (maybe spend less time and money on the moderating of moderate comments tho, some does definitely aliente... pick the right fights not each exceptionally trivial one)
ads – there is an option to pay monthly for digital only access at £4.99
Ah ok, I must have ignored that as it's ridiculously expensive! I'd be happy to tie into 12 months of monthly payments if it was the same price as the annual fee.
If the mag is the thing that drives this place then surely its magazine subs that need to increase in price. The 12 employees are working to produce a magazine. Some of that content crosses over to here, but lots of people don't read the mag, even though it's available to download if you are a member. Also it seems that lots of people don't read the front page articles either, whether or they are paying member though.....
Personally I don't read the mag, and I know Hannah has asked a few times for people to say why they don't read it or don't like the content, but I don't know why, well I do, I find it really boring, sorry. And I'm genuinely sorry about that as I've tried to read it and also tried to quantify why I find it boring but I can't. I guess I'm not into the style of writing I suppose, maybe it's that I'm not really into off road cycling (it's not really an MTB mag anymore is it) in the same way. It all just seems a bit inner circle, cliquey. Maybe I'm wrong and it's all on me, I'll take that, I know I'm a middle aged grump who is struggling to identify with lots of things at the moment.
I understand that times are tough for everyone, personally and in business, but I see you doing your jobs and having a fun and then begging for more money and just think, if you can't afford to do it either put the prices up or stop doing it. But maybe offer different payment options if the prices need to increase.
Begging is not a good business model though.
Don't they make YouTube videos? I'm subscribed to dozens of channels plus get plenty more recommendations via my TV. All have ads in them.
It's you only way I consume MTB content really, bar pinkbike and emtb forums.
I've never seen nor has YouTube recommended me a video by this place, so either they make weird niche content or they dont bother with YouTube.
One thought – canvas the membership to understand what they would buy from the merch shop, if only Charlie stocked it!
Market research, supply chain, logistics, pricing: there you go, you said you wanted and we can deliver;
+1. Ask people what they'd want to see in the shop. The shop needs a damn good clear out. Stick everything that's been sat around for over 12 months and not sold into a clearance section to separate out the chaff and focus on some core elements. Every time there's an appeal I have a browse, but come away uninspired. Currently (IMHO) there's lots of overpriced mugs, some casual T shirts and random chains (what?). There's also a good selection of relevant books, though. I'd be up for a technical clothing collaboration like CTC have with Stolen Goat, but I don't know whether that would be a good seller? (The current ST / Hackney GT shirt looks like it's identifying with a particular cause, which maybe putting some people off 🤔).
As for converting free membership into paid, the Guardian* basically guilt tripped me into paying for a sub with semi regular pop-ups asking to support their journalism. Don't know whether that's been considered/ tried?
* I also weave my own yoghurt 😉
There’s 10 of us by full time equivalent. Not 12 btw. Soon to be 9. We aren’t begging. It’s an appeal. It’s not donations we need it’s members. We aren’t asking or expecting something for nothing. The Guardian does a fine job of asking for donations to support its journalism. This job is often fun but it’s also stressful and not without its significant pressure (I’ve been treated for depression and anxiety for the last 5 years) - just like lots of other jobs. As for the business model - we are in transition from the old to the new. The old was traditional ad funded model. The new is member funded. Well, at least in majority proportions. The old was chasing huge numbers of passive visitors and extracting fractions of pennies from each. The new is serve a smaller but highly engaged audience with a higher return per user. Prices are going up. We announced those in November.
I’m happy to answer questions here or where appropriate directly - mark@singletrackworld.com - in fact the business model here has always been an open and honest one with you all - that’s deliberate. I get that we are an unusual business with a non-typical approach to how we operate, but I guess that’s just a reflection of my own, perhaps naive, philosophy and I’m very much aware it can be a risky strategy.
I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to join as a full member. It needs to be a value exchange. If you like coming here and you like what we do then all we ask is that you consider full membership. If it’s too much to ask right now (we know how tough times are) then staying green is absolutely fine. But fundamentally it’s about openness with our members and making sure that any circumstances ahead are known by everyone who has a stake in Singletrack, members especially, so that we all get to influence what happens in our future before it’s too late. The best lesson I’ve learned over the last few years is to not let problems build up in isolation until it’s too late to do anything about them. Tell those around you when things get tough. We are telling you all now because you are an important part of Singletrack and you deserve to know.
My inbox is always open, as they say.
If you want members, don’t paint a picture of an organisation in existential difficulty.
People want to commit their hard earned cash to something they feel will be around long enough to fulfil its commitments rather than collapsing whilst holding their money.
Do what you need to do behind the scenes. Crack on with quietly and diligently delivering the new business model. But don’t ask for donations and sympathy (a sticking plaster over the wound) when what you actually need is in your own hands (a more fundamental root and branch business model change). There is such a thing as over sharing.
If you are committed to extracting the maximum value from a small base of members rather than building a broad base, go about that transformation deliberately, unapologetically and quietly. I think it is a high risk model as it assumes that there is a sufficient like-minded base of customers out there when in fact the 130k registered vs 6k subscriber statistic tells a different story - namely that there are more casual users than card carrying loyalists. Increasing your loyalist base by 67% is an audacious goal when you are preaching to the converted.
I appreciate that your current model puts you in competition for an ever decreasing pool of advertising revenue. You are seemingly admitting that the competition is too strong and you can’t compete on level terms in that space. It’s certainly a bold move.
Nevertheless, whatever model you choose, do it confidently, commit and communicate less to your customers about things that they really don’t need to know.
As one of the 130k majority rather than the 6k minority, I genuinely wish you well. The world would be slightly less entertaining without STW. The question is, what value will enough of the 130k people put on that? Based on your current output, the answer is not enough. Sounds like you have some plans to fix that and I am genuinely looking forward to seeing the output. In some respects you chaps are living the dream - doing something you feel genuinely passionate about. Not all of us can say that, but something has to pay the bills and to most of us cycling is something we do for fun, not for a living. There’s got to be a lesson there somewhere!
I guess where we disagree is the principal of doing it quietly. I see that (it’s obviously a personal view) as keeping things hidden from the Singletrack community. I suppose I’ve kind of done that for the first 20 years. I’ve decided not to do it that way anymore. That’s a choice but I do respect that it’s not how you would do it. That’s cool 🙂
You are seemingly admitting that the competition is too strong and you can’t compete on level terms in that space
That’s your interpretation but it’s certainly not mine. My view is that advertising as a principal model of media is not sustainable. A more balanced mix of revenues that focus on membership and user generated income is a far more solid foundation for any media brand right now. Certainly that’s how the media industry is refocusing, especially the independents.
Indeed. The beauty of this place is a coming together of very different people united by a common interest.
Things often get a bit heated but in the end it’s just about fannying about in the woods on bikes!
The difference with this particular topic is that some of us have genuine professional skills in just the area that you are struggling with and whether the advice is well received or not, hopefully a different perspective might prompt some consideration and provoke some thought.
In my experience diversity of thought creates a better outcome. Ultimately you make your choice and focus your team on delivering it. Sharing a carefully edited strategy with your customers always makes sense but telling them everything can be dangerous.
It’s not donations we need it’s members.
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)
These two things don't really add up to me.
If you're not a member then the site is terrible with the adverts, at least it was when I last used it when not logged in.
For anyone looking on here the promise of
"the site's a bit crap because you're not a member but it'll be better when you pay a subscription"
doesn't really strike me as a business model that'll attract new members.
Yeah. We hate the ads too.
Mark - take a look at your homepage right now.
Imagine you are either new here or you are one of the 130k casual users.
Ask yourself the question ‘what here is worth paying for’?
Now do the same on any of your rival sites where most of the content is free. Plenty of videos (people like that), plenty of inspiring riders doing inspiring things, advocacy, mixed news. And the lead article on STW? - life’s tough, we are in trouble, please subscribe, and a random article about Jack’s apprenticeship. Again, sounds harsh but that’s what your prospective customers see.
The elephant in the room is that your current content is not of a high enough quality to entice enough people to pay for. Very targeted, very niche but enough to entice the kind of numbers that you need?
Take the latest ‘member only’ content. Hers is the exact wording:
This month for Back From The Dead we’ve got plenty to get through! An update on how Jack’s progressing with his apprenticeship; a couple of tools I’ve made (and one Jack’s made!); a few new cool tools in my box that I like and dislike ; then finally a tale about playing a Cycling Community Chest card and ending up winning second place in a beautiful hammer contest! We’ll start off with young Jack and a bit of an update on his apprenticeship. Since I last spoke about Jack he’s had his first few meetings with Adam his assessor from Activate Learning...
Now read that from the perspective of a non subscriber. Why would I pay to read more? What is ‘Back from the Dead’. What does the zombie imagery tell me? Who is that man in the picture? I have no idea who Jack is or why I should care about his apprenticeship. I am not sure that seeing the 2 new tools that you have made are worth paying to see. And a random story about your hammer holds no interest. It just feels like a geeky party and I am not invited. Not only that, but I actually have to pay to be invited.
As a prime example of preaching to the converted, how will this type of content attract new paying subscribers? The kind of stuff that is broadly relatable is free. The kind of stuff that has a very limited audience sits behind a paywall.
The rest of the homepage is littered with random stories. The inconvenient truth is that most of us come here for the community and the forum. The regular tongue in cheek comment of ‘wait, there’s a Mag too?!’ is not so far from the mark.
Genuinely useful reviews, broadly relatable content, and a sense of community beyond a very niche exclusive club feel has got to be worth trying. Rid yourself of the emperor’s new clothes. Take off those rose tinted glasses. If you want more fee paying members, you have to provide content that is worth more people paying for.
We are all a bit biased perhaps, but take a look at your competition and ask what STW provides that is worth paying for. You need more people to think that the content is relevant to them.
OK that’s genuinely it now. I genuinely don’t want to cause offence but you really need to take an unbiased look at how others see the site, not just the card carrying, subscription paying loyalists. You already had them at Hello!
Following on from what daveylad said, is there any YouTube content? I've never seen any pop up on my feed and it's usually full of mountain bike content. Doesn't that pay ok when done well? I watch pinkbike and gmbn which is a bit like Top Gear on bikes. Yes it's repetitive and dumbed down but it is entertaining and it's enthusiastic mountain bikers talking enthusiastically about mountain bikes. It would be great to see a slightly more measured, thoughtful, and dare I say middle aged version from stw. It's most of the way there with the podcasts anyway. And if it already exists then your SEO needs some work 🙂
^ that. at the risk of this coming across as a pile on the home page has at least three articles on it from 2021. added to which i take at most a passing interest in cx and snowsports. i come here for bikes and arguing. 🙂
if you hate the ads too how about trying the guardian model mentioned above for a month or two and see how that gets free members or visitors to convert to see if it pays off? if the ad revenue is falling off as you say it shouldn't cost too much to run the test?
i come here for bikes and arguing.
That one sentence sums it up so brilliantly!!!
So not for how to make a coffee in the wilderness? Not for a snarky article about matching your bike to a super car? Not for another snarky article about the latest Rapha nonsense? Not for a 2 year old article about ski resorts having to close early because of Covid in 2021? Nobody wants to be reminded of Covid, least of all 2 years later about a resort on the Canadian West Coast!!!! When was the last time you looked at your own website with fresh unbiased eyes?
Take a look at your competitors. You have 2 year old articles about non related content. They have a steady stream of directly relatable bike articles where the oldest thing on the homepage is 2 days old. And it’s all free.
The model you aspire to will only work if you can provide something that more than 6k people want to pay for in the face of free content elsewhere.
Right, I’m off to fanny about on my bike.
Video reviews and trail/ride vids is a good idea. Available to paying members on here first then released on you tube a month later or something. Just be more enthusiastic and informative than Yorkshire sarcasm, and have fun doing it.
Then up the prices and charge monthly:
£5 p/m paper, £60 annual. £3 p/m digital, £36 annual. £1.50/£2 forum only (no content) until it's free on you tube a month later. #moremoniesbettercontent
I know that we only see what we want to see, but I read this but in Charlie's article
Our way forward as an MTB community is through you, our members.
At the moment, it seems like the only thing you want from the community is more money.
For me, the best thing about STW last year was TJs voyage. Other than the bike build, that all played out on the forum. I've always thought that there must be some way to create more synergy between the STW corporate presence and the forum content. At the moment it's basically one-way whereby front page posts get their own thread (often duplicating existing threads). I don't see forum content being promoted or captured.
Other, similar, threads have been made difficult by the limit on the number of links allowed (it's not beyond the wit of man to differentiate between photo links and others) and might also be something that would attract a readership.
These, more dynamic, types of topics aren't really suitable for magazine inclusion, more the blog format but, again, thats where I don't think STW make best use of the forum - and community - content.
Oh, and fix the search function as #1 priority. The forum could be an amazing repository that would bring folk back repeatedly but it's obscured by an inability to find anything in it.
Edit: two dodgy formatting errors FFS!
Well those 3 pages were a difficult read, I came here for some light relief and now am wondering if it will still be here in 6 months.
The other thing that happened was I kept seeing bloody adverts all over my screen, turns out my membership didn't auto renew due to the debit card being out of date. Fixed now, adverts are still here for a while until payment is cleared. How anyone uses the site with adverts I will never know.
@Solarider made a lot of interesting and informed points albeit quite hard to read when talking about something that has been part of my life for so long, must be quite hard to read as a parent of the baby. But something does have to change, even as an old skool print lover like me (I was actually a lithographic printer for 15yrs of my working life) I spend the majority of my time absorbing video content on Instagram or You Tube, and print is resigned to the bedroom. I hardly ever read the articles on here in digital form and vists to the site are either for the forum or for the classifieds. Something is not working on the digital content side to draw me in.
I wish you luck STW and hope like hell you are around for us in the years to come.
Another long time stw’er (since issue 1). Think @Solarider has made a lot of very valid points.
Long story short, I’m here for the forum / STW community, the other content and magazine isn’t imo up to scratch. Kind of lost as to where STW pitches itself? Pinkbike have the racing / event side done really well, bikepacking have really good longer format soulful content and is a great example of a well designed engaging web page, Cranked do the niche print better than STW (sorry, but there it is), YouTube channels and forums do bike and equipment reviews much better (a bit of blurb, spec list and generic ride report really does not cut it).
sorry if this is hard to swallow, but as a long time supporter of STW I really don’t see enough beyond the forum to make me want to spend anymore of my hard earned £
^ this, unfortunately
That's digital first - I come for the forum, and have paid on that basis - knowing I'm going to get the Mag.
Never having had access to much of the front page of the website I've not been visiting, so on the strength of the forum alone - and the ask for help - I've made a purchase. Not one that's going to land me in hock either - at the UK minimum wage that's 4.7 hours of work for a year's subscription - without discount.
For the ads, I'm so glad to have seen them go. It's game-changing - so you guys should only browse the forums with them on - there's formatting possibilities of where to stick them on the page. But I generally browse on PC, not so much on mobile - but I guess you know where your people are coming in from. (And you could have cookies that last, I hate having to re-sign in every month or so - your site is the only one that I do that on - most of my other sites cache my credentials and maybe make me resign in every six or twelve months at best).
Other than that, love that this place is community driven - so I don't personally have a problem with you asking the community. It's an ask for help but @solarider is correct in that it can feel like begging and it did go through my mind "will I get 12 months of of my sub back" - but then, I'm wealthy enough not to care if I lose that much cash. Others may not. It's your decision - but for me I'm OK with it.
Anyway - I wish you all the best in the transition to your new model and hope there's another 20 years of STW to browse 🙂
Hi @Mark. Quote from this morning's email:
Well, to tell the truth the survey already existed - it was by chance the results also shed clear light on the number of our members who just visit for the forum and nothing else.
The results? It turns out that 4.3% of our members are not at all interested in the magazine content. So not such a demand after all. It’s not a surprising result to be honest.
Could you shed a bit of light on where the 4.3% number came from?
It sounded like you were going to do a survey but didn't, as you think you had the data already. I'm intrigued, and a bit worried, what the data is that led you to this conclusion
Cheers