Singletrack Staff Blog

I’ve had my head buried in the accounts for what seems like weeks now. Sadly, despite the monotony and the fact it’s about as far from riding bikes as you can get, I’ve found it really quite interesting. I admit that’s probably mostly down to th efact that they are OUR numbers and not someone elses. I can’t imagine the tedium of being an accountant for a wallpaper company. But these are our numbers and that makes it thankfully a lot more interesting.

So here’s a few of the impressive ones..

Paper Weights
The last issue of Singletrack (issue 40) had a print run of just short of 24,000 copies and issue 39 sold a total of just a few dozen short of 15,500 copies! On first look that looks terribly wasteful and it is really. But as it turns out we are one of the most efficient titles on sale in the Newstrade. Yes that’s right! For every two copies of Singletrack sold another copy doesn’t sell. And those unsold copies get turned into pulp by the newstrade. They do end up being mostly turned into more mags but even so, it turns out that selling magazines is very wasteful. Learning all about this stuff is what is making me look at ways to make Singletrack more efficient on the newstand. It’s also another reason to buy our PDF version of the mag too.

Digital Print
For every standard subscription we sell currently we sell two Premium Subscriptions. Our Premium Subscriptions are subs that include the usual seven printed issues but also access to our entire back catalog of PDF downloads. To be honest we only really introduced the PDF version of the mag to try and offer our overseas readers a version of Singletrack that is more affordable than the print version. In the US a copy of Singletrack ends up being around $12 on the shelf! That makes it tough to compete when the domestic titles are selling for a fraction of that. But to our surprise it seem PDF copies are universally popular even here at home where we sell printed copies the cheapest.

Subscribers
There’s currently 4436 subscribers to Singletrack. Our subscriber levels have NEVER reduced in all our seven years.

They love us!
WHSmiths seem to be going bonkers for us! There are about 525 WHSmiths stores in the UK and they are pretty much the dominating force in magazine retailing although Tesco are trying to grab some of that share from them (Remember how it always used to be fruit and veg you hit first when you went in the supermarket? Now it’s racks of mags and newspapers). Well last week we found out that WHSmith have increased us yet again in terms of the number of shops they stock us in. Now we are to be found in 495 WHSmiths, that’s lots more than majority of other bike titles out there. And then there’s Tesco. they currently have us on the shelves of 250 of their biggest stores. Adding up the numbers from all over the UK it seems we are on the shelves of a grand total of 3000 shops, which is a lot more than this time last year.

All in all, Singletrack is easily the fastest growing mountain bike mag in the UK by a long way! And even though I’ve spent the best part of the last month moving numbers around on a screen, that sort of information really does remind me that I reckon I have the best job in the world. I just need to ride bikes a bit more

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Mag News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.