NEUBIBERG, Germany (BRAIN) Feb 13, 06:56 MT While the rest of the publishing world is figuring out how to supplement print products with digital and online coverage, the team behind the velobiz.de website is doing the opposite.
Four years after launching, the German language B2B website will begin publishing six magazines annually to supplement its online news source.
“Especially as a trade magazine sometimes you want to dig deeper into themes with more extensive reports and interviews. Those contents work better on paper. A paper magazine gives us more freedom about how we present our content to our readers. Big pictures work better on paper. And most of our users still like to read longer articles on paper rather than on a screen,” said Markus Fritsch, the former longtime editor-in-chief for leading trade magazine SAZ Bike, who co-founded velobiz.de with Juergen Wetzstein, SAZ Bike’s former editor.
When velobiz.de debuted in late 2007, it was the industry’s first online only trade magazine. Back then, and still today, Fritsch believed the Internet was the faster and best media to publish news.
“As velobiz.de developed over the years we clearly saw that the Internet doesn’t work well with elaborate contents. Therefore I think it’s consequent to flank velobiz.de with a print magazine,” he said.
The cost for the print subscription will be folded into the 70 euro ($92) annual fee for access to velobiz.de. The site has 3,300 subscribers—60 percent of which are retailers—who will be the primary reader base for the magazine. Velobiz.de will mail each issue to an additional 1,200 non-subscribing dealers.
Each issue will cover a topic such as urban mobility, workshop organization or 2013 trends while the website will remain focused on the news of the day.
The January 2012 inaugural issue covered Europe’s booming e-bike market.
—Nicole Formosa
nformosa@bicycleretailer.com
