BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
During February, the month when the Audit Bureau of Circulation verified figures for print (and sometimes digital) magazines land, BikeBiz took some time out to interview several of the cycling industry’s consumer facing publishers. Here we catch up with Immediate Media, the publisher now behind BikeRadar, Cycling Plus and many more:
Nearly a year on from acquiring the majority of Future Publishing’s bike portfolio, Immediate’s team is now happily settled into new Bristol offices that include a purpose built bike workshop and photo studio.
Having taken over the likes of BikeRadar.com and Mountain Biking UK, among many others, the publisher has built on an already massive audience, now claimed to be some 4.4 million road cyclists and 3.3 million mountain bikers, every month.
Investment in digital and a refresh of print titles is already well underway, with Cycling Plus one of the first to unveil a new look with its Bike of the Year issue this month. In a move to embrace the growing number of female cyclists, a women’s-specific offshoot of BikeRadar.com is also promised for 2015, as well as a revamped Shopping Partner programme and renewed focus on video content.
Steven Seaton, managing director for the sport division at Immediate told BikeBiz: “In the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) figures, our audience continued to outperform the market with Cycling Plus head and shoulders ahead of its rivals with a monthly circulation figure of nearly 50,000, while our mountain biking portfolio dominates the market with a 70.5 per cent share of the market. Our flagship title, MBUK alone has a 50.6 per cent share, with a print circulation of 31,820, over 13,000 (13,273) more than its closest competitor.
“In a mature market, our digital properties Cyclingnews and BikeRadar continue to see strong growth, with 30.6m page views in January, up 7 per cent year-on-year. We are in the process of rolling out a redesigned and redeveloped version of CyclingNews this month to bring it into line with developments already live on BikeRadar, such as a responsive platform optimised for mobile devices, and more effective ad formats.” Though the publisher currently has nothing in the pipeline, Immediate does have an in-house team dedicated to event management, so there could well be movement on this in future.
For more insight into the consumer media, see the rest of our series here.
