Calling All Readers: We Need Your Support!

Header image by Colt Fetters from The Bikepacking Journal 12

It’s been seven years since we realized we couldn’t rely solely on advertiser support. That’s when we launched the Bikepacking Collective membership model, and we’re immensely grateful to the folks around the globe who’ve signed up to support our work. Since 2018, our members, scattered across 70 countries, have enabled us to publish many thousands of inspiring and informative posts, hundreds of original bikepacking routes, nearly 500 YouTube videos, and 15 beautifully printed volumes of The Bikepacking Journal. They’ve provided the means for our close-knit team of three, then four, and now five people to make a full-time living doing what we love. If you’re reading this as a member, thank you for believing in us and powering our passion.

Keeping our editorial calendar packed with a wide-ranging mix of quality original content day after day, year after year requires a tremendous amount of time and effort, including regular late nights, early mornings, and weekends from all of us, but we have no ambitions of expanding into a massive team of 50 or 100 people churning out endless articles for the sake of clicks. A core cast of characters with distinctive voices, a wealth of experience, and diverse interests creating in-depth, trustworthy articles is fundamental to BIKEPACKING.com. We wouldn’t have it any other way, and with the backing of our members, we don’t have to.

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Still, this labor of love has always been a bumpy ride behind the scenes, and we feel the impacts of today’s uncertain climate just like everyone else. A lot more people visit us daily and benefit from our deep well of content than actually contribute financially to its creation. With today being the deadline to join the Bikepacking Collective and receive The Bikepacking Journal 15 in your mailbox, we hope to rally readers to open their wallets and help sustain the site. You can directly contribute to the creation of everything you see here for as little as a few bucks a month—$3.25, to be exact. We don’t like being in a position to ask for money, but our commitment to keeping the site open and accessible to the countless folks who are only just discovering the joy of bikepacking or don’t currently have the means to support us requires asking readers like you to pay for something that’s otherwise “free.”

Others in the cycling space have followed our lead and launched similar member-supported models in recent years, but we’re confident that we provide unmatched value through the Bikepacking Collective. If you’re in a position to support various outlets and organizations, we hope you will, as they could certainly all use a little help. But if money’s tight and you’re trying to decide where to pledge your hard-earned cash this year, I hope to convince you that an investment in BIKEPACKING.com offers an unparalleled return for you as an individual reader and to the broader bikepacking community we’ve been fostering since launching the site in 2012.

What Your Money Gets You

At the heart of what we do is our first-of-its-kind network of more than 500 bikepacking routes spanning some 125,000 miles around the planet, each meticulously documented and regularly maintained to the extent we’re able. Our members make it possible to develop and update our most ambitious and inspiring routes, including the Tian Shan Traverse, the Eastern Divide Trail, the Iceland Divide, and the Route of Caravans, to name but a few. We pledge a portion of our revenue to building fresh flagship routes each year, and we add community-contributed overnighters and other more approachable tracks weekly. If you’ve enjoyed riding one of our routes, please consider giving back by becoming a member.

Available exclusively in print and only for members, The Bikepacking Journal is our original publication showcasing the year’s most captivating writing and brilliant photography across each issue’s colorful pages. We spare no expense in its production, using a world-class printer in Germany. The Bikepacking Journal ships to our Sustainer and Builder-level members ($5.50/month+) all around the world, and we regularly receive notes from folks expressing just how much they enjoy sitting down to thumb through each issue and savor the stories in a slower and more tactile way that’s simply not possible on a screen.

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Our members have access to the most extensive discount program in all of cycling, with more than 70 top-tier brands offering exclusive savings to the folks who support us. Your membership can pay for itself several times over if you’re already planning to pick up a new frame, components, bags, or other goods from one of our partners. We’re always working to add new discounts, and offering 100 of them is the next milestone we’re working toward in the year ahead. In the same vein, we’ve done 229 Collective Reward giveaways to date, about three a month on average since 2018, hooking up our members with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of great free gear. The current batch is valued at around $9,000 and includes a complete Hudski Dualist, a Stooge Dirt Tracker frameset, Paul Klamper brakes and levers, and a ton of other drool-worthy stuff. It’s not too late to join and be eligible for this round!

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Funding our work as a member makes an open-access, ad-lite experience possible for millions of readers every year. As a paying member, you’re giving the gift of tens of thousands of reviews, stories, guides, routes, event listings, films, and more to others with a shared interest and curiosity. Further, member support ensures that absolutely everything on the site is free of editorial input from our advertisers. We have never published a single piece of paid content or a sneaky advertorial, and having a strong member base means never needing to consider blurring those lines to pay the bills. We’re really proud of our 12-year track record of running unbiased, objective content, knowing we’ve consistently maintained integrity and not caved to the mounting pressures of sponsored content when navigating a turbulent sea. Our advertisers have clearly distinguished banner ads and their logos placed in the site’s footer, but that’s the extent of their presence here.

Beyond paying our core team for their everyday work, membership revenue is essential for fairly compensating the many occasional and frequent guest contributors whose voices add incredible diversity and depth to the site. When reflecting and deciding what to recognize as the year’s best guest pieces for our annual Bikepacking Awards every December, we’re always blown away by the outstanding quality of writing and photography that folks from across the community contribute. We want to continue raising our rates and feel more comfortable taking chances on unconventional ideas and intriguing projects that would-be contributors send our way. The cycle of bikepackers finding the site, learning from our wealth of in-depth guides and tutorials, following one of our routes somewhere around the world, and ultimately publishing a story is truly special, and Bikepacking Collective memberships help fund every aspect of that journey.

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I could go on, but the last membership benefit I’d like to highlight briefly is access to our Bikepacking Collective Basecamp, a series of tools designed to connect our members with us and with each other. Basecamp features three modules: Bike Camp Co-op, which enables members to buy, sell, and trade gear with like-minded folks around the world (there are curently 1,400 listings and growing); Ride Rendezvous, through which members can organize outings and find riding parnters; and Ask the Experts, which allows members to pose burning questions to our team and the broader group for fast and direct answers. Members also have access to several exclusive site features, such as Bucket List, Route Log, and Bookmarks, with more useful tools on the way.

Please Support Our Work

Since 2012, BIKEPACKING.com has been the web’s leading resource for all things bikepacking, but it’s only gotten more difficult for us to maintain our longstanding momentum and high standards. Whether it’s the tripling costs to ship The Bikepacking Journal, the growing challenge of banner ad sales, skyrocketing web hosting fees, or rising living costs making folks less likely to directly support independent media, we feel various pressures from all sides.

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Frankly, we’re at a crossroads in terms of what we want to accomplish versus what we can actually afford to do. We have a ton of exciting and original ideas for new posts and ongoing series, but time and money are always the limiting factors. This post is a follow-up to my 2019 article, Making the Case for The Bikepacking Journal, which established our vision for creating a printed publication and earnestly asked readers to help us realize it. Many folks believed in it and backed us as a result. Now, six years on, we’re again asking readers like you to help fund our next chapter, enabling us to take a breath, follow our passions, and confidently roll into the year ahead without worrying if we can preserve the site. If you read BIKEPACKING.com and get some value from it, the single best thing you can do is become a member of the Bikepacking Collective at any level. Each and every membership helps.

Here on the site, over on our YouTube channel, and in the printed pages The Bikepacking Journal, Logan, Neil, Virginia, Miles, Nic, and I pledge to always pour our hearts into everything we create and share. As long as we’re able, we’ll keep bringing enthusiasm, honesty, and personal insight to the route guides, how-to tutorials, essays, long-term reviews, stories, and other pieces we’re each uniquely suited to do best. We’re incredibly fortunate to call this our work, but we need your support to continue doing it. If you’re able, please join the Bikepacking Collective today to help us continue building this one-of-a-kind resource for fellow bicycle travelers worldwide.

Sincerely,

Lucas Winzenburg
Managing Editor of BIKEPACKING.com
Editor-in-Chief of The Bikepacking Journal

Further Reading

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