[Closed] New Forum...Coming March 15th....probably

The plans are certainly interesting and seeing how these guys have come on since I first met them is amazing. Standing there at Earls Court with no product to show as it had been nicked to an office they own themselves and a load of different staff milling about it's great. The mag plans and forum plans are a fairly large next stage and I'm looking forward to it happening proud of then to see how a dream has come out to be such a success.

2 old and unfeasible requests here:

list of who's logged on

possible to log on as a different username (you could even make it come up in a different colour so we know it's not the real TJ - and presumably t'mods could still see who'd really done any nortiness)

go on !

go on

printed on super high quality paper taking it from an already hefty 380g per issue to well over 580g

Do we need heavier paper? Really?

I do not want subscription (I tried it), IPad format, or access to "premier" content.

What I want is to be able to buy ST in paper format in the shops, when I feel like it: in my LBS, in WHSmith, at the Airport, in Tesco.

At the moment I can only get it in WHsmith if they haven't sold out by the time I look. Otherwise MBR is all I can get - but MBR is consistently cr@P, and yet I still buy it sometimes because it's all there is on the shelf when I want to read a bit of paper about riding and bikes.

[sulk]

possible to log on as a different username (you could even make it come up in a different colour so we know it's not the real TJ - and presumably t'mods could still see who'd really done any nortiness)

Other than nefarious and mischievous reasons, why would you want this?

We aren't pulling out of high street retailers completely but we will be scaling back availability in shops other than bike shops where we will be increasing availability. That's for no other reason than simple economics. The high street is hugely expensive and massively wasteful - we simply can't sustain that. All magazines are being hit hard in the high street. The industry wide figure is that all magazine sales are down 17% yoy. Some titles have seen their circulation figures halved! The sale or return model of selling magazines is so incredibly wasteful it sickens me. To sell one copy you need to print two. For us we print over £35k of magazines a year that end up in skips. That's a model of business that no longer works when magazine sales are in free fall. Something has to give, and it will. At the end of this year there will be fewer magazines to choose from. My job is to make sure that Singletrack is still here and to do that a lot of things need to change.
For us, since we've introduced the integrated print and digital subscription system we've seen a 20% increase in subs sales in a year. Scaling back on the high street model and focusing the mag where it's still growing means we can change the whole design of the mag from one designed to be sold in a newsagents to one designed for subscribers.

Everything from the thickness of the mag dictating how many can be stacked on a shelf to the cover lines and the cover image itself can now be changed since our target market are not casual browsers but regular subscribers. Essentially we can make Singletrack the mag weve always wanted it to be without having to play the newstrade game and make compromises.

Economically speaking a copy read by a subscriber is worth more than two sold in a newsagent. So by increasing subscribers and reducing newstrade sales and waste we can invest in the magazine itself. That will manifest itself in more creative content and a higher quality feeling magazine.

Bike shops will be a huge focus in terms of how the mag is sold to non- subscribers. The old sale or return model will stil be there but we are introducing a better model that offers dealers access to advertising and other web based resources. In return they will offer our subscribers not just the opportunity to buy the mag but also to access exclusive deals. But they will also be able to sell subscriptions too, which has never been done before. Hopefully we'll be trialling the first iTunes style scratch off vouchers at the london bike show this weekend.

The mag will be thicker, redesigned and well, just more gorgeous :-). There will be a cover price increase and it won't be a small one - that's just the economics of the changes I'm afraid. But, we are holding subs prices where they are until 1st April before a modest increase to cover the extra postage costs of mailing a heavier mag will kick in. The difference between buying the mag in a shop and subscribing will be increased dramatically.

There will be more ebooks for subscribers and more electronic supplements like the Editors' Choice in issue 70. And of course there is the Mag Archive that now has over ten years worth of mags in it. That will be continually updated with new issues in new formats as fast as we can develop them. The plan is that you subscribe once but get every format Essentially where we can build in an extra benefit for our subscribers we will do. Addition and retention of subscribers is the future for us, not the continual dumping of thousands upon thousands of mags into skips every year.

That's all for now. I'm going to try and write a regular blog about progress as we head towards relaunch. We aren't hiding anything and I see no reason not to be honest about our plans and why we are doing them. There's a revolution in publishing going on right now and these changes are very necessary if Singletrack is to stick around for another 10 years.

The mag will be thicker, redesigned and well, just more gorgeous :-). There will be a cover price increase and it won't be a small one - that's just the economics of the changes I'm afraid

Sounds like a move towards the kind of model that Privateer has adopted. Hopefully a good thing as I reckon a mag like that will only survive if the content is really high quality, which if it is will obviously benefit us readers. Best of luck with it. Don't think I've seen anything specifically mentioned about forum changes. Care to share any teasers?

The mag will be thicker, redesigned and well, just more gorgeous 🙂

Careful, you might build expectations too high.

[img] [/img]

Just kidding, I'm sure it'll be ace!

log on as a different username (you could even make it come up in a different colour so we know it's not the real TJ - and presumably t'mods could still see who'd really done any nortiness)

Other than nefarious and mischievous reasons, why would you want this?

Used to be possible, back when this was all just fields ....
Was good fun, so yeh to mischief, noh to nefariositynessment. I don't think anyone was ever fooled (for long anyway) by it.

Will existing forum users need to reregister when the 'new' forum launches?

Sounds like a move towards the kind of model that Privateer has adopted. Hopefully a good thing as I reckon a mag like that will only survive if the content is really high quality

That's a really importnat point. If you're going to up the price substantially, the quality has to be there. I've always seen ST as the best of the cheapies (WMB, MBUK, MBR) but not at the same level as The Ride Journal or Privateer. The raise in price will have to be justified in content as well as due to the changing face of print media.

However, that said and done, with the likes of Jenn, Dave, Matt and with Chipps at the helm, I'm pretty confident it'll be a success. Good luck ST!

Still I'd like to have on the website something VERY CLEAR about what a premier subscribtion give me accesss to, and the wide range of offers.
Plus I'd love to be able to buy an article just when I want to;

We've considered the buying individual parts of the mag option but to be honest since you can buy access to the entire mag archive for just £2 for a month I can't see what the commercial attraction would be to sell a single feature for £1 say.

What we are aiming to do is to not just increase the quality of the mag and the content within it but to simplify access to everything. So yes, the signposting and content of a premier subscription will become much much clearer - the buying process is already a vast improvement on what it used to be when we sold subscriptions through our online shop. So we've decided that adding in the complexity of being able to buy individual parts of each individual mag is not viable. It's certainly possible and one of the future developments of the mag archive is to allow subscribers to build their own unique issue ie. Don't like interviews? Then untick the interview box etc. But in line with the overall strategy, any enhancements we build will be included in the existing subscription rate. Subscribe once, get all the benefits, formats and features.
It's a great time to subscribe as your subscription will grow in terms of the content and features you get access to.

I also totally understand that some people will rather wait and see what the relaunch will bring before they commit to a sub, and that's why the first relaunch issue will be held back at the old cover price rather than being launched at the new price. Similarly there will be a 'time window' where you can see the new mag and still subscribe at the existing price before the subs price goes up to deal with the extra postage costs of delivering a fatter mag.

BTW at the moment all the benefits of subscribing can be found from here [url= http://singletrackworld.com/premier ]Singletrackworld.com/premier[/url]

So if the mag is going to be available in less high stret shops, but more bike shops, that will mean we now have to go to a real bike shop to read or buy it.

Also why the thicker paper, seems like a waste of trees and recycled paper, as well as the extra cost of transportation and storage.

Hang on a minute! Just to be clear on this..... there's a magazine?

😀

By going into a bikeshop to buy the mag, the bike shop benefits from you being there.

The cycle industry as a whole would rather you were standing in a bike shop flicking through the mag, than the middle of WHSmiths.

Sounds like ST is moving in the right direction - best of luck with it 🙂

What's a magazine? 😐

What's a magazine?

There's a forum?

The thicker paper is because that's now an option for us since we are not focussed primarily on wasteful distribution into the newstrade.

here's an example of the newstrade game we and every other mag has to play..

A N Other branch of WHSmith (tesco or any other high street mag seller) puts in a request for how many copies of Singletrack they want next issue. This figure is based on a number of factors but mainly on how many they sold last time. Now shops have limited shelf space and so they order copies based on not only how many they think will sell but also on how many they can physically fit on the shelf.

If Singletrack is printed on thinner paper they can fit say 20 copies on the shelf and we can hope that they will sell 10 (the rest go in the bin). We've sold 10 but printed 20 to do so.

If we print it on the paper stock we woudl like to the shop will only be able to fit 15 on the shelf and we will only sell 7.

Now that sounds daft at first... surely the number we sell should stay the same at 10? Well it doesn't.

Mag sales in the high street are in the main impulse buys. Impulse buying is a bit of an odd thing it turns out and is influenced by lots of silly things like keywords you put on the cover (FREE, WIN, SEX, XXX are recognised as the most effective keywords you can splash on the cover of a magazine if you want to attract sales). But the most strange buying influence of all is the relationship between the number of items stacked on the shelf and the sales thereof. Stack 20 mags and you will sell 10. Stack ten and you'll sell around 6/7. Buying behaviour of impulse buyers is influenced by the quantity of stock in front of them.
This is why supermarket shelves are always extremely well stocked. A half empty shelf won't sell as well as a full shelf.

So, back to us then. If we make the mag thicker (which we all want to do cos we love our mag and want to make it look and feel as good as we can afford it to) then we will reduce the amount we can fit on shelves and in doing so we will reduce our sales.

Now that we are refocussing our distribution towards subscribers and not the high street we can look to make the mag thicker as the high street is no longer our main concern when it comes to sales. The money we save in reduced sales on the high street and ergo the huge reduction in waste we can invest back into the content and the paper stock of the magazine. A fat, super gorgeous and lovely feeling magazine is much more attractive to the subscriber market. We've been printing second covers without all the commercial high street shelf oriented cover lines for years just for bike shops and subscribers. Now we are gpoing one step further and making the magazine a subscribers' mag throughout instead of a newsagents standard model version.

🙂

I've gone to subscribe a few times now but never quite made it.
Just give me a **** page where I can enter my card details (you don't need my address as I only want digital and I don't want a direct **** debit) or paypal and give me access!
It can't be that hard! Take my money!!!

I subscribed a few years back. Was such a ball ache, actually getting the magazine on time, I gave up.

Not sure why I am relating that piece of information.

Everything you need to subscribe is a a click of the 'Subscribe' option on the main menu at the top of this page. No DD... just card.

We need your address as that's where we send you your members card and any free gifts we may include in your sub package.

Did you say FREE GIFT?!?!

Just to clarify something about how magazines to subscribers are despatched. We use the Royal mail's Presstream service. What this means in simple terms is that ALL subscriber copies are collected by the RM AT THE SAME TIME. they enter the system all together. Once in there there's nothing we can do to influence how quickly RM deal with them and what this means is that some are delivered before others and some take a lot longer. At the moment there is just no alternative to this system. Even competitors of RM currently have to use RM at the point of delivery for standard post items so using another provider would still not solve the delivery range.

Subscriber copies are collected the day they come off the press. newstrade copies are deliberately held back by two days in order to give subscriber copies priority. In the main that works. Sometimes it doesn't and that's frustrating.

That said, part of the advantages of subscribing go far beyond just having the mag delivered. It's a lot cheaper for starters and there's a lot of extra benefits that only subscribers get. However, I appreciate if all you want is Singletrack delivered before the shop copies and none of the other benefits are important to you then having the mag arrive after the shops get it is really annoying.

Mark - That's all really interesting*. Where did you get all the sales info from? Is that research you've conducted yourselves, general industry stuff, or a bit of both?

* for a sad old git who used to design magazines

We aren't pulling out of high street retailers completely but we will be scaling back availability in shops other than bike shops where we will be increasing availability. That's for no other reason than simple economics. The high street is hugely expensive and massively wasteful - we simply can't sustain that.

Thanks for sharing this and so much more of the thinking behind this Mark, it's fascinating and I think you're making a brave and entirely justified move.

I hope that people who spend so many (presumably enjoyable) hours on this forum will choose to support it by subscribing to the mag rather than whinging about not being able to buy the mag in Smiths any more or offering their own egg-sucking tips instead.

It's good to see a publication I like has a firm strategy for dealing with the challenges of the modern media landscape and the ever-increasing expectations of readers/users for free content.

Bit of both. general industry wide data is easily to get hold of from the distribution networks. The numbers I've quoted come directly from market share numbers available to all distributors from the WHS Wholesale market which represents about 65% of the uk newstrade market.

Thanks for the expalnation of how shops work , really interesting, and so very wasteful if so many mags go to recycling, without being sold or read.

And it should get us into the bike shops to buy, or to purchase a sub, which will give you a guaranteed income and youll not have so much mag wastage.

Best of luck.

2 final things, will the mag still be bi monthly, and what mags are going to disapear,by the end of the year.

So just write WIN FREE SEX across the front page of each issue and you'll sell loads more copies!!

Can I please put in a request for a fashion section on the new site!!! Or one where we can talk about other hobbies without getting a ban 🙂

HELLO!

So just write WIN FREE SEX across the front page of each issue and you'll loads more copies!!

Surely just offering free sex, rather than a slim chance of winning it, would sell more copies?

We aren't pulling out of high street retailers completely but we will be scaling back availability in shops other than bike shops where we will be increasing availability

Bold move.

I'm sure I'm not alone here, but I rarely go to a bike shop but I visit WH Smith regularly to buy magazines.

I appreciate the benefits the new setup could bring to bike shops, but it's s bold move for ST. I do hope it works for you though.

v. interesting.
from my perspective, and I'm sure that this is shared by many others, I don't really care when my magazine drops through the letterbox as long as it does, or if it reaches the shops before it reaches me. I read it when I have the time/ inclination. maybe those who are really bothered about getting it ASAP could pay an extra sub, to get it sent direct rather than through RM Presstream.

Perhaps they can offer up forumites, first up Jamie, followed by yeti, elfin, tj etc etc

I'm sure I'm not alone here, but I rarely go to a bike shop but I visit WH Smith regularly to buy magazines

You are certainly not alone but fewer people like you are actually buying mags in shops now.

You will still be able to buy Singletrack in WHS. In fact later in the second half of the year we will be looking at possible introduction of Singletrack in WHS supplied airports. That's hugely expensive but it's possible that the new format will work very well there.

Oh and HELLO! Wrecker. Have you clicked the 'subscribe' button on the menu?

😯

I don't really care when my magazine drops through the letterbox as long as it does, or if it reaches the shops before it reaches me. I read it when I have the time/ inclination.

+1

Will it have email notification of replies to posts back again? I miss those days.

so very wasteful if so many mags go to recycling, without being sold or [i]read[/i].

Interesting stuff on the economics of shelf space/mag sales, I tell you humans are freaking weirdos

Oh and HELLO! Wrecker. Have you clicked the 'subscribe' button on the menu?

Cant help but wonder if you get a ban for being a premier member called rick.

Mark, are you still going to be sticking to 8 mags a year with the move?

Will you expand the editorial team, or buy more stuff in?

Very interesting the comments from Mark, as a paper magazine subscriber I never realised how the mags were sold via the shops and the wastage.

I think that the changes sound like they are needed and are a good idea and best of luck to all at ST, still the best magazine by far.

(still only ever got one discount card when i first subsrcibed 3 years ago, never received one since..)

Yay Wrecker! Welcome to the club 🙂

Vinnyeh, we will still be 8 issues a year. Quality not quantity. Editorially we've already added Jenn to our team and we will hopefully have another designer on board in the next few months too. Editorial budget is being increased so long as the economics work. ie.. waste reduction plans need to generate the money that we will invest back into the content.

In short we intend to make the distribution and presentation of everything we do much more efficient and economic. The savings that will bring will be ploughed back into the content.