Cost of living crisis and Singletrack – An appeal

We are under some pressure and we thought you should know about it now before it gets worse and things get harder. Estimated reading time: 8 minutes T …

By mark

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Cost of living crisis and Singletrack – An appeal

Brave post. This is a great place and I want it to continue, it is far greater than the sum of its parts. A rich vein of knowledge, compassion, argument and irritation in equal parts! After a few years of free membership I coughed up for a print and digital membership last year. Although I have had to scrutinize, justify and bin a few other subscriptions recently, I get too much from STW to get rid any time soon.

I hope you manage to convince a few others. They would miss it if it were gone. Good luck!

As above – very brave post, would hate to see STW go.
I’ve already cancelled a couple of subscriptions I have but have kept STW as it seems to offer the most.
Good luck in attracting new members, and looking forward to the site updates.

Great post – crazy times all round. Got continue to subscribe too and will be browsing the merch. If there’s nothing I fancy I’ll pop a donation in.

Good luck.

I 💕 Singletrackworld.

Thank you for being honest – and all the new plans sound amazing.

I love it too, and spend way too much time on here! Thanks for the openness and honesty and here’s to some new members to keep us going!

Don’t be afraid to up your prices! Those who subscribe for a printed physical magazine like STW won’t really notice an extra fiver or so a year.

I’m in the print-trade and there’s only one way paper prices are going at the minute and if past experience of paper merchants is anything to go by prices will never come down again so don’t try and ride it out just to please a few whingers.

The only other magazine I subscribe to is Motorsport Magazine and they’ve just upped their price by 50p / month.

Anyone know if the full print membership includes shipping the magazines to Canada?!

Canada is on the list. There’s an extra £10 on the standard annual price to cover the extra postage.

If you haven’t already got one, treat yourself to a timber bell from the merch pages. The best way of defusing cyclist vs horse rider conflict on bridleways!

I keep trying not to look on here but keep failing.
Really like the feel of the magazine, love the photography and am more than happy to support it in the little way I can.

Besides, you can’t go now I’ve had the leg tattoo.

Have to admit I’ve ‘downgraded’ from a print to digital subscription this year – thanks for the prompt to get the signed back up.

Can only echo the posts above. Currently don’t envy the stress of running a publication especially in this Current climate!

You could easily double the monthly cost of digital subs I reckon. Can you add a ‘pay what you feel you want to’ option? Or some other kind of optional sub?

EDIT just seen there is one on the donation page.

The ‘pay what you feel’ idea has been discussed here. The theory is great but putting it into practice is harder as it’s a regular payment and it’s not always easy to create a regular payment subscription with a variable amount. Not impossible but it’s a bit tricky.

I’ve set up an option to create a monthly donation over on the donate page. And that can be set up to any amount you like in £5 increments.

Happy to pay an increase in the subscription, and I’d buy more clothing but it’s all made for wee people. Well, people significantly wee-er than me!

On the side, a small rant.

I know those without a subscription/full-membership are unlikely to read it, but I was always mystified by very active and seemingly positive posters who had the attitude of “it’s my contributions to the forums that drive benefit for the owners, so I why would I pay to subsidies it?”. Some of whom have since left.

OK, as is often the case, that point of view is not incorrect. But folks, lets not chop off noses to spite faces. Is this a site a great resource? Absolutely. Is it a vibrant and active community of likeminded people with opinions on a huge array of topics biking and non? Definitely. Are there things that happen on here that go way beyond what would be expected (even I have been positively impacted by this recently)… incredibly so.

Why on earth would you not want to support that? Do it.

Cheeky edit: “… There’s a magazine?!?” 😆

This seems the best place for what may be a daft merch question… Does the drinks flask fit in a bike bottle cage? It looks like it should, but I’d expect it to list that as a feature if it was sized to carry on the bike.

Thanks for keeping us informed Mark. I upgraded a while back to a print and digital sub. Nice to have a paper copy and disconnect from the world with a coffee/beer now and again.

Changes to the website sound positive. I find the reviews really useful but a nightmare to navigate/find the review I’m interested in.

As others say I’d imagine a lot of us middle class, middle management, IT working, Audi driving stereotypes can afford a couple of extra quid a month for STW. But on the flip side it’s great that it welcomes all and doesn’t have a paywall.

What gives you the best financial advantage, if you don’t mind me asking? Digital or digital and print? I’m happy to drop the paper mag if the physical production costs are adding to the burden. Or yeah, as others say, put the price up a bit. I don’t recall a rise in the past few years even though there’s been a normal level of inflation.

The publishing industry is an utterly shitty place to try and earn a living. My missus is/was a journalist – she’s mainly writing novels these days – but the money she gets offered, despite decades of experience, is terrible. Some of here friends who still rely on journalism for a living are properly struggling. Even the big, well know publications are offering day rates that haven’t increased in almost 20 years. It’s depressing.

@tthew It’s a rather complicated equation to be honest. Although the margins in print are getting hammered the thing with print is that it very much works on an economy of scale. To illustrate what I mean I’ll make a crazy extreme example.

With a big single print run like a magazine there’s a huge portion of the final bill that is essentially setup costs. What this means is that if we wanted to print a single magazine on a huge press it would cost £5k (Hypothetical example of course because you’d never do this). To print 6000 copies costs a total of, say £8k. Because of that initial setup cost it means that each extra copy we print costs proportionately less and less.

So, what I’m saying here is that if half of our current print members downgrade to digital only that would actually push up the costs of the printed copies and increase the pressure on our print membership product pricing.

But print isn’t the right option for everyone and so I’m really not keen to say one is better than the other. Pick the one that’s right for you. I’d rather you paid £20/year for something you find useful than £39 for something that includes a printed mag you aren’t interested in. As far as margins go, there’s currently roughly about the same margin in both options for us so by picking one or the other we benefit the same. That’s as it stands. Like I said though, if I said digital is best and that results in a rush on downgrades then that would potentially be worse for us.

Does that make sense?

Just paid. I’ve been here for years without putting my hand in my pocket, time to change that.

Digital only, a choice made (should Mark or anyone care) on how I wish to consume my media, rather than financial.

I’m speaking up now, while it’s not too late to do anything about the tough times ahead.

Thanks for the honest and open post, I’d much rather know where things are with STW now before anything becomes an issue. Thinking about it all reminds me how much I value STW and how much I’d miss it if it disappeared. I mean, I might have to actually ride my bikes if the forum and mag disappeared…

Edit – interesting info re costs and digital-only vs digital and print. Still can’t beat paper format for reading articles IMO. I spend most of my day using a screen and don’t want to read my mag digitally. Maybe more folk need to give that a(nother) try, if they can afford it, in light of that info re costs?

I’ll take this opportunity to highlight another unexpected way that many of you have helped us financially without even knowing it.

This thread from a few weeks ago for example earned us about £180.

PSA – Very cheap Fox 38 performance elite and factory forks

Because it contained a direct link to the product on offer and we have a system on the forum called Skimlinks that affiliates all outgoing links to a very large number of retailers. That £180 was our commission on the forks that you guys bought.

Telling the rest of the community when you spot a total bargain by starting your post with PSA, is a great way that we all win.

Just make sure you include a link.

@toby.
Yes the drinks flask sort of fits in a cage.
it doesn’t have the narrower bit where some cage snug over the bottle… you know what I mean.
I have used it in both titanium and nylon cages and it works on the cages I have used. It’s not a perfect fit, but has worked for me.

The flasks are out of stock right now, but not for long. Klean Kanteen are lazer’ing up more for us any moment now. There is a “Wait list” box on the product page… pop your email in there.

flask product page

Great! Thanks, @charliedontsurf. I’ll get one ordered when they’re back in stock 🙂

bit crass – which subscription is most profitable for Singletrack – digital or print?
Will “re-become” a full member.

EDIT – read the comment noob!

I’d rather you paid £20/year for something you find useful than £39 for something that includes a printed mag you aren’t interested in.

i pay the £39 as i feel its worth it just for the forum. i dont read the mag that comes with it so i take it to work for others to read, but they dont either.

is there an option to not send me the mag and save that cost, even tho its minimal? send it to someone else instead?

Been posting here since it was all fields, was a mag subscriber right from the off, then I lapsed, then I subscribed during COVID but honestly never read the mag so it lapsed again…gone digital now, its the future or something. Good luck at keeping it all together…many people, not just you, are going to be roundly screwed this winter whilst the zombie government holiday.

Great post.

Weirdly this is why I never bought a lifetime subscription – I’d rather keep paying annually and keep the cash flowing into Singletrack Towers.

forty quid for six issues of a great print mag is an amazing price, I’m sure I pay over ten quid for Cranked at four issues a year so some scope for Singletrack to up the annual subs for print I reckon!

cheers,

Keith

Because it contained a direct link to the product on offer and we have a system on the forum called Skimlinks that affiliates all outgoing links to a very large number of retailers. That £180 was our commission on the forks that you guys bought.

Cool, glad to have helped….

Postage costs and print and paper costs have risen

Stop sending me the paper mag. As a lifetime subscriber I’m making no ongoing contribution and I’m perfectly happy downloading the .pdf of the mag. In fact the download is all I ever look at.

Stick the price up if you need to, everyone else has!

That was a tough read, but I’m glad and grateful you’ve given us the chance to help out, even if just a little. Everything I would like to say has already been said, far more eloquently, too (I think I do my best stuff after several beers), so I can only echo those posts, adding that I would like the magazine to continue: I may take a while to get round to reading them, but they’re always a treat when I do.

I would head to the shop, but if I get any more t-shirts, I’m going to need a sponsorship deal, so I’ll donate instead.

Like many others, I hope you keep the ship sailing merrily. The place just wouldn’t be the same without you.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, perfect. I’ll stick with the print subs in that case so I don’t dilute my bit of the fixed cost then. 👍

New paper,new smell…..

Price up seems inevitable and sensible, but not sure how I feel about the ‘donate’ aspect of this story.

If this was mountain rescue, air ambulance etc, donate request is for me perfectly acceptable but for a private business mountain bike magazine?

The subs for what you get are still very reasonable. I like many others probably skip/not interested in half the mag, thought recently the recipes bit of a waste of pages and the amount of pages given over to Guy Kesteven bit much!

But as an example Claudio Caluori article was well worth the time to read.

Does feel at the moment as if STW mag is slightly trying to redefine what it is.

Price up seems inevitable and sensible, but not sure how I feel about the ‘donate’ aspect of this story.

I know what you mean, but it’s a small business being honest with it’s customers. It’s the honesty bit which is the unusual part. Businesses don’t normally talk about how they’re doing and you just assume they must be fine, until one day you notice they’ve gone..

I had this walking through town and noticed our local independent outdoor shop had closed after 20+ years in the city center.

I would really miss STW if it went.

ok, so I signed up to print and digital when it was on offer… does that mean you are losing money on the deal? if so I would be happy to not actually receive the paper copy but stay on the P&D subscription so it renews at full price?