About road.cc subscriptions

NoScript will solve that for you.

When you say solve, you mean break the website.

Not sure we have the same understanding of punchout and return.

I was replying to this remark from you:

>  Will this mean subscribers won't get funnelled through skimresources.com ?

No script doesn't break the website, but it can mitigate the creepiness and stop skimresources' script.

For my part, I have no idea what "punchout and return" is supposed to mean!

Ah, ok. I have another 'thing' <cough, cough> that doesn't like skimresources.

Punchout is where it takes you to another provider to make a payment (or order goods in some set ups). On return, the starting website gets an ok back to say payment was ok and they don't know about your payment methods/cards.

If you use noscript it can mess these routing up ! Although I find local news sites without activating noscript unusable.

mdavidford wrote:

Quote:

 So we’ve choosing a different path – supporter subscriptions.

Never mind the ads - will there be a subscription package that gives access to proof-read versions of the articles?

Seconded.

Sorry but at the moment the messiness of the site (what with all the ads etc) goes quite well with the messiness of the articles and copy published.

If you are to improve your content (thinking along the lines of Bikepacking.com), then subscription might be worth considering. At least you are setting the subscription price low, presumably in acknowledgement of the slightly tabloid position that the site currently seems to occupy.

The whole site is systemically a series of adverts. The great majority of the articles are adverts.

To exchange cycling information for the readers' money in a more honest way, you would need to be far more critical of many of the products you push via "articles". You would need to change your role from creator or supporter of a cycling consumer-fest to a role that pays far more attention to the interests and cycling activities of those who cycle than to the interests of those who sell cycling products.

You would also have to do rather more to move the national cycling zeitgeist from MAMIL & faux-racer, to cater for a far wider range of cycling types.

The seeds are there. At present they're overwhelmed by the weeds of consumerism and cycling-is-sportism.

And you need also to stop doing inverse Daily Mailism by having all that shock-horror stuff about cycling misadventures. 99.9% of cycling is misadventure free.

Cugel

I've always thought of Road.cc as not especially mamil-y, especially as there's less reporting on races now compared to what there used to be (obviously none at all at the moment). Compared to other sites which cater purely for the most expensive raciest kit and equipment with a reader base who are likely made up of very few racers, I think the balance on here is pretty good. Yes there will often be fairly expensive high end gear, largely because the brands that produce them are the ones who want to market them so will be sending them out for testing etc. A large fact of the matter will be those who aren't cycle for sport types probably don't spend very much on equipment and kit, so won't be visiting a cycling website all that often.

Cugel wrote:

And you need also to stop doing inverse Daily Mailism by having all that shock-horror stuff about cycling misadventures. 99.9% of cycling is misadventure free.

Cugel

Ah, the "you didn't actually fall or die, did you, so that's all right then" argument.  The 0.1% is a terrifying prospect for those of us who risk it, and there are probably 10,000s who are completely off-put by it. 

Well, no. It's not you did X, nothing happened so doing X was ok.

There are loads of stats collected about journeys and KSIs. It is simply saying we have a good idea about the risks. Where risk is not put in context or overstated, then the perception of the risk can be incorrect and the the activity is not undertaken. You wouldn't start watching plane crashes on youtube and suddenly decide to cancel your trip as a result.