14 word on the street TRACK Jo Cummings: Well the first thing I have to ask is: a million people! How did that happen? Mark Alker: Well for a start, the community existed way before we had a print magazine. In the late 90s, I became a freelance journalist, working for several cycling magazines. Most of the magazines I worked for closed within the space of 18 months, leaving me with a dilemma. In 1999, I, a handful of other techie people, and a group of mountain bikers all came together and said, “Why don’t we just create a website and call it a magazine?” So we launched a website called gofarmtb.com – GOFAR standing for Get Out For A Ride – and we created longform content. We published once a month, all at once, like it was an actual physical magazine. This was bizarre in the extreme back then! We decided to add a piece of forum software to the website, and people would read the content, and since nothing was going to happen on the website for another 30 days, they’d talk about it in the forum. Within a year, we had about 6,000 people a month contributing to the forum. When did you move to print? When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000, I realised that the only way we were going to make any money from creating this content was if we printed it. And so I joined forces with an editor I knew – my current business partner. We went to the community and said, “We want to print this as a quarterly magazine, and we’ll charge £12 subscription for it. But if you pay upfront now, before we even start, we’ll tag on an extra issue for you.” Almost 500 people gave us £12 a pop, and that’s what got us started. We created a print magazine, revamped the website, changed the url to singletrackworld. com. And on day one, we inherited the community that had been there from the very beginning. It’s fair to say that the ‘power of community’ is working well for you as a publisher… Absolutely. The community has stepped up to not just support itself but also support the people who’ve needed it, for example, when one of the members is in trouble. There have been several times that we’ve stepped in to help members of the community above and beyond what we would normally do. And the community has stepped up to help us, certainly in the last few years. When you’ve got a community you trust, and who trusts you, it allows you to be really honest. We recently put out an appeal, saying that the price of producing print magazines is going through the roof and we’re trying to get ahead of it. I said, “We’re not in trouble now. But we see trouble down the line.” The support that we’re getting from the community is inspiring. How did your community come into play during COVID? We had exactly the same symptoms as the rest of the publishing world: as soon as lockdown started, advertising contracts disappeared. But of course, advertising revenue is always volatile, whereas reader revenue is steady and predictable. So we put out an appeal saying, “We’ve just been kicked in the balls and our advertising contracts have gone out the window.” And we gained about a 20-25% uptick in membership. As things have opened up, we’ve suffered a decline; however, we are higher than when we started. We’ve got a new baseline. It’s a community in the truest sense of the word, isn’t it? There’s a lot of chat around the importance for magazines in building communities, but you’re talking about a genuine multi-way support system. Yes, and the magic ingredient is being in it. The editorial team is absolutely key to building that loyalty and community. And you can’t fake it. If the community doesn’t trust the people who are hosting, then it won’t work. It’s got to be a two way street, and that’s one of the hardest things to do. You need to be as passionate about the subject matter as they are. I’m a mad keen mountain biker, so when discussions kick off in the forum, I join in. That in itself breaks down those barriers between editorial teams and readers – and you have to break that barrier if you want to be able to create a forum. Do in-person events play a role in that? In the early days, events were how we reached people. It was great for community building, because of course there’s a direct connection between us and the readership, which is absolutely critical. Looking back it’s probably the best thing we did. Plus we’d actually made some cash, so it was well worth it. Over the years, that started to change. The numbers didn’t stack up. Yeah, we get that contact, but we’ve now got a million people coming every month to our website. ‘When you’ve got a community you trust, and who trusts you, it allows you to be really honest’
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