Back in the mists of time (2014 perhaps?) I first wrote a thing about how we make money at road.cc. Another spoiler… it was the ads and, in the main, it still is. 

The landscape is always changing if you’re an independent publisher on the open web, though, so over the years we’ve added new ways of making money – sponsored content and affiliate buying links being the most prominent. Now we’re adding another: a dynamic paywall. We’re not the only cycling website making this move at this time. Our friends at Singletrack are introducing one too, and neither of us are the first cycling title at this particular party.

I’ll explain why we’re doing this further down the page, but first let’s talk about how the paywall will work, and who it will affect (because not everyone will encounter it). How much will it cost you to get past it? 

Fifty pence is the answer to that one, and that buys you 24 hours access to everything on all our sites: road.cc, off.road.cc and ebiketips, plus permanent access to the article you paid for – just like if you were buying a magazine that would be yours forever, but without the risk of it accidentally going in the recycling, or the dog/kids/your life partner shredding it because all you think about is bikes and riding and not them… but maybe that’s just me.

So who won’t be affected by the paywall? 

Quite a lot of you. Existing subscribers, naturally, and if you’re a regular enough visitor that you consume our news, reviews and features pretty much as soon as we publish them, you’re unlikely to hit it either. If you’re reading this there’s a very strong chance you’re in one of those two groups, and you will rarely – if ever – encounter it.

That’s because, as you’ll have guessed, not everything will instantly be paywalled. News will go behind it after a three days, reviews and features after two days, and tech news may well stay free. Buyer’s guides will be paywalled from the get-go, though.

How will the dynamic paywall work if I want to buy an article?

When you load a paywalled page on your phone or laptop, you’ll get the headline and the intro as a taster, along with a pop-up message inviting you to either pay 50p to carry on reading, or to take out a monthly subscription for £2.49 (yes, we’re putting the price up, for the first time ever, but subscribers get ad-free access to our sites too). You’ll have seen this or something similar on many other sites already, I’m sure.

Our paywall is operated by a company called Axate, and the first time you hit it you’ll be directed to a payment screen which gives you a load of options for ways of paying into your Axate wallet. 

Axate operate a ‘federated wallet’ system – which is a fancy way of saying that any money you pay into your wallet can be spent on any site that uses Axate for their paywall. You could put money into your wallet on road.cc and spend it on Singletrack, or the Yorkshire Post, or the Toronto Star, or any other site that uses their wallet system. Or you could just spend it all with us.

Why are we introducing a dynamic paywall?

We’ve always been committed to giving you the best in-depth, intelligent, informed and independent news, reviews, features and buying advice we possibly can, better than you’d get if you paid for it. The way the ad funded open web worked meant we could do that, but not any more. Blame it on the bots, Trump, the Russians and global uncertainty, but mainly Big Tech’s bots. 

While publishers like us are committed to the open web, Google, Meta, Open AI and the like are, whatever they might claim, actively working to break that model: scraping sites without permission and stealing content to train (and feed) ChatGPT, Gemini et al to give you often hallucinatory answers to questions about cycling (or whatever you ask them). A sheen of credibility may be added by sometimes referencing the sources of their illicitly scraped info, but they almost never direct the person asking the question onwards to find out more from the true source of that stolen knowledge.

It’s called a ‘zero click search’. While that’s great for Google or Open AI, it’s not so great for the publisher bearing all the cost of providing that information the tech companies are profiting from, while getting nothing back for it. Yeah, I don’t like AI. So if you’re reading this ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity… clear off!*

Stir into all that a big dollop of global political and economic uncertainty, and as publishers we’re forced to choose between quality and independence, or a race to the bottom.

We chose quality and independence, and we hope you will too. Even if it occasionally costs 50p.

*or something less polite