BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
Wade Wallace, publisher of the globally-popular Cyclingtips website, has penned a strong piece urging the cycle industry to do more for womens’ cycling, especially womens’ racing.
In "Nine things I learned after launching a women’s cycling website" Wallace wrote "Get a woman hooked on cycling and she will have a fire burning in her belly a hundred times hotter than anyone I’ve ever met."
Last year Wallace launched a womens’-cycling offshoot of his website, called Ella’s Cycling Tips. This is run by Anne-Marije, Simone Giuliani, Jeanine Laudy, and other contributors – it is performance-based, with a strong committment to covering womens’ cycle racing.
Wallace wrote he founded the off-shoot because "there’s a gap in the market and a massive market in that gap."
However, industry advertisers have not been beating a path to his door. Or, at least, not with anywhere near the same insistence as for his original magazine site.
"The popular thing for the industry to say is “we support women’s cycling” but few are backing that statement with dollars," opined Wallace.
"We find it just as hard to get advertising and sponsorship dollars as I imagine a female athlete or women’s team is having. With the exception of the generous support of Specialized, Pearl Izumi, Trek, and now Orbea, our support has been extremely limited."
He added that "nothing shuts down a conversation with a prospective advertiser faster than notion of supporting a women’s specific publication" yet he stressed Ella’s Cycling Tips has "hundreds of thousands of female readers."
