A Sincere Thank You to Our Members

compose Logan Watts
time Oct 30, 2020
comment 34

While the most front-facing aspect of our membership program comes in the form of The Bikepacking Journal, which we print and ship to our supporters twice a year, the Bikepacking Collective annual membership is actually what maintains our digital platform and helps ensure a sustainable future for BIKEPACKING.com.

In all honesty, before we launched the Bikepacking Collective, I was a little apprehensive about the website’s future, and had even considered closing the doors of this endeavor. Advertising has grown increasingly challenging for sites like ours. As Lucas put it in Making the Case for the Bikepacking Journal, “Launching a printed journal in this day and age might seem like a crazy idea. Or perhaps a risky one at best. After all, I’ve watched most of my favorite magazines go out of print over the past several years, one after another.” With that, our approach required a little bit of backward thinking—use the Journal and other such perks to encourage folks to support and sustain the website.

Of course, we keep minimal advertising on the site which helps pay the bills—many thanks to all of our supporting advertisers—but it’s the Bikepacking Collective that has provided the needed stability, allowed us to nearly triple the amount of quality content we publish each year, increase contributor pay, and spin up several meaningful initiatives—including the Bikepacking Collective Routes Fund, the Access Fund, the Local Overnighter Project, and our YouTube Channel, as well as the creation of a lot more routes and projects yet to come. So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you to everyone who has pledged their support.

As a small token of gratitude for those of you who joined the Bikepacking Collective prior to our October 17th deadline, we’ll be including a sticker sheet with your copy of The Bikepacking Journal 05. The sheet includes seven stickers screen printed on high-quality clear vinyl backing for use on bikes, bottles, or anywhere else. Make sure to fish it out of the cardboard mailer when your copy arrives later this year. And stay tuned for more exclusive merchandise in the first half of 2021. We’ve had a lot of things in the works, but due to COVID-19 and associated shipping hiccups, we’ve put them on hold until the situation is shored up a little—particularly with international shipping.

For those of you who joined the Bikepacking Collective after the October 17th deadline for issue 05 of The Bikepacking Journal, we will be offering some of these stickers—along with other merchandise—in the coming months (specifically to members). Stay tuned.