Would you pay €15 a month for original cycling documentaries?

GCN’s YouTube content is a bit of a rite of passage for new cyclists or those who start to take the sport more seriously. Want to figure out how to get faster on hills? Set your bike up on tubeless tires? Get some tips for better commuting? Start researching those topics and chances are you’ll end up looking at a GCN video. 

During the halcyon days after GCN’s owners, Play Sports Network, received investment from Discovery Network in 2017, it was the home to live streaming of pretty much every professional cycling race worth watching (and some that weren’t but that’s a different story). If you were roadside at the Tour or a Spring classic, chances were someone nearby was going to be streaming GCN on their phone/iPad/laptop and you’d know what was happening before the peloton arrived. The €40 for annual access was a steal for any serious cycling fan. 

The writing was on the wall for GCN last year when Discovery announced it was shuttering the GCN Plus app. But it was still sad to hear last week that after GCN was bought back from Warner Bros Discovery by founder Simon Wear, 18 jobs have been cut. The new owners immediately decided to shutter its news website - globalcyclingnetwork.com, which now redirects to the YouTube channel so not even the archive of the last year is available. In less than a year the GCN website racked up 22 million pageviews from 6.6 million unique visitors (in reality the number of people who visited the site is a lot less - a unique is just a combination of web browser and operating system so me visiting from a computer and my phone are two different uniques). 

Sounds impressive but the ad dollars from that kind of traffic wouldn’t support much of an editorial operation. According to Google’s AdSense calculator, a European focused sports website with 2.5 million pageviews a month would only generate about $32,500 a year from display ads. In reality GCN would also have been able to attract sponsorships and likely used a specialist media agency to sell its ad inventory, which would have increased revenues, but it does give you a sense of how challenging it is to produce quality journalism supported by ads. 

So with the news website gone, what's next for GCN under its new-old owner? According to a rather, let’s just say “stilted”, explainer from long time presenters Simon Richardson and Dan Lloyd, GCN will now focus on its original video content which had made it so popular. Its main channel has 3.26 million subscribers and has produced over 7,000 videos. 

Subscription pricing has just been announced. For €2.99 a month you get access to the Musette level of membership which gives you a badge beside your name in comments and live chat, access to some custom emoji and discounted GCN merchandise. The next tier is Casquette which is €14.99 and as well as the Musette perks, gets you access to the GCN+ documentaries, members-only polls and priority reply to comments. If you’re feeling really flush you could spring for the Bidon level at €24.99 monthly, which adds an exclusive GCN water bottle and signed GCN book to your perks. Although not mentioned as a perk it seems like GCN’s YouTube channel will be the only place you’ll be able to see Dan Lloyd too. 

At the same time as all the changes at GCN emerged changes were being announced Warner Bros Discovery told subscribers to the Discovery Plus app in some European markets that the app was being retired the day after the Tour de France ends, and they’d have to start forking out €15 a month for HBO Max rather than the €30 a year they’d been paying for Discovery Plus. 

For those that work in tech, there’s a famous phrase from Jim Barksdale, the former CEO of web browser pioneers Netscape, that there are “only two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle; the other is unbundle.” Bundling is the process of bringing together products that used to be sold separately, into a single package which can be purchased at a lower price. That’s what’s happening with live racing coverage being pulled into a HBO Max app that also offers entertainment and a host of other content. 

GCN’s videos and documentaries have effectively been unbundled into a separate package, where you’d either expect to be able to pick and choose what you want and thus save money (Think the way Napster and Spotify allowed you access just the songs you wanted without having to pay €15 for a physical CD). 

It’s unclear what the benefit to cycling fans is from CGN being out on its own, and how much value current viewers will see in those paid tiers, particularly if they can continue to get their regular GCN YouTube content for free. Compare it to HBO Max, which starts at $9.99 in the US, and €15 a month for cycling documentaries starts to sound expensive.