Who owns what? Part 1: Cycling magazines

YellowCrank started with a premise: Give exposure to brands, products and topics that are less covered in cycling media, be it online or print media, big web shops or other form of information distribution.
Whenever Specialized or another big brand announces a new product, you read similar content everywhere on the web, typically a praise of some sort, with trendy keywords such as “confidence inspiring”.
Are there a few big players dominating the cycling market, and are there media empires behind a majority of publications, and what are their inter-dependencies?

This is part 1 of a series dedicated to bringing a little light into this topic, and I am starting with the traditional cycling media, the print magazine.

Let me first show you this graphic:

This is the monthly circulation of 14 main cycling magazines. Bicycling is leading with around 300K copies, then far behind are two other U.S. publications, Mountain Bike Action and Road Bike Action with around 70K copies each. Most other magazines, even well known ones hover around the 20,000 mark or even below, and year-on-year numbers are falling.

That does not look good. Where are all the readers? How do publishers pay for all their staff, printing and other cost with such low distribution?

Magazines struggle

As it turns out, this is indeed challenging. When I researched the publishers and magazines, I noticed how frequently they change hands. There are takeovers, bankruptcies and magazines disappearing. It’s quite a ride.

This is of course not unique to cycling media, the loss of readership and advertising dollars has been for many years now a challenge to all traditional print media.
Readers changed reading habits, getting more and more information from the web, and often for free. Brands shift advertising budget to online, and often skip the middleman (+traditional media) all together and promote their brand directly to the consumer, via Facebook, email lists, Instagram and so on.

The change of reading habit is typically countered by print media by installing a web presence. There content is often free, but at least they get some digital advertising income. Further, they can sell advertising packages of print and digital content to the brands.
Some magazines also build a brand and community, with very active forums and buy/sell sections such as Singletrack, or by organising events and races.

Magazines depend on advertisers, but they’d rather have subscribers

It is clear, though, that the less readers pay for content, the more magazines depend on advertisers. And advertising brands typically would like something in return for placing ads: that is some form of editorial content, such as testing of their new product. With reduced staff due to cost saving measures, there is a risk that content is in effect more and more decided and created by the advertising brands, and good articles and independent reviews become less prevalent.
Further, space costs money, especially in print. Since most readers want to learn about anything that is new with big brands, that is what ends up occupying the pages. There is little space for other editorial content.
Magazines do not like to depend on advertising revenue, of course. They would much prefer to have a majority of income from reader subscriptions. Subscription revenue is predictable income, advertisement income is not.

So who is still investing in print? Lets take a look finally into who owns what:

There are two big corporate media houses that own cycling magazines, Hearst in the US with the big dog, Bicycling, and Burda with Cycling Plus and Mountain Biking UK. The balance of the magazines is owned by smaller publishing houses and private owners. Rouleur Magazine is owned by Matteo Cassina, who besides having bought this magazine from Rapha, also owns Italian Titanium bike brand, Passoni.
So while Hearst and Burda are indeed media “empires”, most publishers are small and fight for survival, or are even projects of love.

Between the time of this writing and your reading, there might have already been changes in the cycling media landscape. If you value print magazines and don’t want to see them disappear, go and buy a copy once in a while, or better: subscribe.

Part 2 will follow with a overview on the digital media space!

Got any feedback or questions? Please comment in the section below!