What A Failed Motorcycle Blog Taught Me About Charging For Content

Or, what happened to Hell For Leather?

Way back in the mid-2000s, I started a little motorcycle blog that quickly grew to dominate that space. Hell For Leather broke every news story, spoke truth to power, and inspired a new generation of motorcyclists to take up the sport. It also had an incredible community that would see major designers like Michaels Czysz and Uhlarik chatting with both industry executives and normal readers. It rapidly came to define the two-wheeled space. But we struggled to earn money.

With a large, passionate following, it seemed a logical move to build a metered paywall, and charge readers a subscription fee. When we rolled that out in 2010, we were among the first online publications to try the model, which is now commonplace among major media outlets.

The thinking at the time was that because we dominated that space to such an extreme degree, and were the only publication in it that transparently worked for its readers, this would have been a no brainer. We forecast a 10 percent take rate, and structured a low price with a goal of not financially burdening readers.

There’s a couple reasons why it failed. The first and most significant was simply me. I was creating pretty much all HFL’s content, but hadn’t set up a realistic financial runway around working without a paycheck. I wasn’t a rich kid, and despite an impressive-sounding career in media already achieved, working in media doesn’t exactly pay much. So, living out of my meager savings while freelancing to cover the shortfalls was just not working out. I was approached with an opportunity to round up some private equity and make a bid for Cycle World, and rather than stick to our plan and see HFL through, I jumped at the chance for an accelerated financial timeline instead. We came second place in the bidding, while I was distracted HFL’s content suffered, and our plan to scale subscriptions didn’t work out.

Take rate ended up being under 5 percent. I think at its peak it was around 7,500 subscribers. Multiply that times $1.99-a-month, pay transaction fees, operating costs and taxes, and we just weren’t left with the kind of income that could have scaled a business or paid living wages.

That math is another reason for the failure. It’s hard to find multiples of $1.99 that can create a real business. Being one of the first online publications to ever try this, we made a mistake that I’ve since seen multiple others make since: failing to understand and appreciate the value we represent to our readers.

The biggest hurdle with subscriptions isn’t the outright price, it’s simply getting people to sign up for one. Away from small budget tech hurdles that made the paywall and payment process buggy, we were just asking people to pull out their credit cards, and start paying for something that they’d become accustomed to enjoying for free.

When HFL failed, we failed our readers. 15 or so years later, there really aren’t any meaningful media outlets or channels or…just anything around motorcycles, that industry is rapidly failing, and no one seems to care.

Now imagine if we had charged $19.99. I think if you had asked anyone who went through the trouble of subscribing in the first place, that wouldn’t have have felt like poor value. And the numbers just math a lot better at a higher price. Had Hell For Leather lived up to its potential, we could have scaled rapidly into something really significant. Imagine a technically functional, attractive website with multiple salaried contributors. We were in talks to create a television show for a major cable network. I wanted to create effective, useful buying guidance around both bikes and riding gear to exist at the retail level, for the first time enabling riders to spend their money effectively.

15 years on, what would that have looked like? It’s impossible to say, but I think it’s reasonable to assume that the motorcycle world would have looked differently than it does now. And that alternate reality pivoted around a single decision on how to value content.

This is what’s on my mind as I’m building this Substack. I want to start writing more again, I want to do so with more freedom, and I want to do that with and for my audience. I want to be useful to you, and in return I hope to again charge for content.

I’ve already turned on subscriptions, but haven’t put anything behind a paywall. Before I do that, I’d like to hear your feedback about all this. What do you want to read? How do you want to pay for it? And where does the line between free and paywalled content make sense? Thousands of you will read this. I want to hear from you.