MEDIA SPECIAL
Tell us the story
Is print ‘dead’ as the saying goes, or is there a future for hard copy mags who employ a careful strategy? Print is by no means dead – total retail sales value for the cycling market is up year-on-year. This is driven entirely by the road category and is down to the growing interest in our sport and the wide range of strong products available for different categories of the market. Our plan with the magazine is to do things that no other media can do as well as print – which is why we invest so heavily in the quality of the paper, photography, image reproduction, presentation and journalism we use with Rouleur.
ROULEUR Interview with managing director Bruce Sandell
What have been the biggest challenges that the publishing business has faced over the past few years? Finding a profitable transition to digital media for traditional media owners. Even the rise of digital magazines has so far shown fairly small incremental revenue, the last set of ABC’s showed sales of seven per cent for the market – this ultimately seems to be made up of what would have traditionally been export print sales for many (they are down at almost 29 per cent across the cycling market). We have relaunched our website recently – this now has two revenue streams for us, product sales and also we will soon be offering advertising against our journal editorial content. Our strategy is to build properties around our successful print magazine for our aspirational high spending audience and for our partners to interact with them.
BIKEBIZ.COM “The transition
to digital media has been a
challenge for many.”
Bruce Sandell, Rouleur
2013 saw a buyout by Gruppo Media – how has the affected the business’s growth, plans and resources? The buyout concluded in April last year and was the result of about a year’s work, so was a huge relief to get it done. The rest of 2013 saw us mainly focusing on the important ‘back end’ side of the business. Things like getting our accounts systems and reporting in shape – we also took on a new FD, who is very experienced in both big and small media companies in the UK and overseas. In November we launched our new website
– which was the conclusion of nine months hard work by the team at Rouleur, who all did a fantastic job. We also recently invested in marketing by
recruiting Ben Ward from the Mirror Group to become our new marketing manager – he will oversee driving print sales, launch our digital bundle subscription and continue to increase sales/ traffic via our website.
The UK’s cycle media produces a variety of product feeding cycle consumers
Recounting the past year’s business and discussing the future of print and digital, Mark Sutton gives the key cycling publishers the opportunity to say as much, or as little as they wish about the challenges facing the media. The responses paint an interesting picture of the future of cycling journalism…
How are subscriptions fairing? They are growing nicely, we hope to break through the 6k mark soon. Most of our growth has been organic and word of mouth – we have done very little marketing to date. That will start in increase significantly now we have Ben in place. We will really be gearing this whole area up for growth. We have an extensive event plan this year to meet more potential readers throughout 2014.
You’re now readable via Apple’s App store – are tech savvy cyclists jumping at the chance to read a digital format, or are print sales enduring? It is relatively small for us currently, with around 1,000 sales on each issue. We expect this to increase once we make the magazine available as a bundle – whereby subscribers can add the digital edition for a small increment to their print subscription. This will nicely compliment the print mag and mean readers can keep that pristine copy at home.
With increased competition on the market what do you feel is keeping current readers loyal to your title? We redesigned the magazine for the first time since launch at the back end of last year – but our main focus is to keep on improving what we do and keep innovating. That is what keeps us ahead of the rest of the market in our reader’s eyes. We have some exciting plans for how we will be treating our product brand stories for 2014 – that will see us move ahead of the competition again.
Tell us about the stockist packages for bike retailers looking to carry mags.
BIKEBIZ MARCH 39
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