The Ride Goes On
Ben Delaney spent 25 years building cycling media brands, then realized he didn't need the institutions anymore.
Editors at every media brand in the world are privately discussing whether they should leave on their own terms to start a new media company, or wait for tthe ax to fall.
And why wouldn’t they? Every quarter brings a new round of layoffs, while employees watch everyone from Kara Swisher and Brian Morrisey to Don Lemon, Taylor Lorenz or Paul Krugman build personal media brands. Many claim to be making far more money and reaching larger audiences than they ever did in-house.
The trend is coming to the outdoor industry, albeit somewhat slowly. So this week I wanted to talk to Ben Delaney, a prime example of an industry veteran building new media success. Ben is a long-time bike industry editor who worked at Velo and BikeRadar and held a post in global marketing for Specialized. After losing his job at Velo in 2022, Ben has more than survived — he launched what has become a thriving YouTube channel called The Ride.
When I caught up with Ben, he was just home after back-to-back trips, first to Italy as a host of a gravel cycling adventure tour, then a few days covering Sea Otter Classic.
Pair this with my recent conversation with Nick Reimer, who arrived at YouTube success via the opposite path, never having worked in media or even studied it closely. Nick is a true digital-native creator, and Ben is his mirror image — a veteran journalist who was forced to pivot into launching his own media brand, but found significant success.
Ben seems to have pulled off the career switch that every editor is talking about privately. Enjoy the conversation.
PC: When you were let go from Velo/Outside, what did you see in the marketplace that made it apparent that there was an opportunity for The Ride on YouTube?
BD: Well, a couple of things. I had the idea the last time I got laid off that maybe I should give this YouTube thing a crack, but I didn’t do it. At the time I was seeing guys like Ray at DC Rainmaker have some success, and it went from looking at people who were doing stuff like that as “What’s going on?” to “Maybe that’s the move.”
And so I picked Ray’s brain a little bit, and then called a couple brand folks and asked if I were to do this, would you support me? And I got some nodding heads, but ultimately I found it was quicker to just get a job and have a salary and a 401k and all the comforts of home.
I’m old, and I’ve been around the block, and I’ve done a lot of the other jobs, and I like the freedom for better or worse.
This time around, I’d had more conversations with people like David Arthur, who had been on a similar trajectory as me of working for bike media and then starting out on his own. And I was like, well, shoot. I’m gonna try to do that.
I guess because I’m old, and I’ve been around the block, and I’ve done a lot of the other jobs, and I like the freedom for better or worse. I like trying my own thing. Working in global marketing at Specialized was the biggest budget I ever had to play with, and in many ways it was the most prestigious job. In a lot of ways it was fantastic, but it also was the polar opposite of having the freedom to do whatever the heck I want, and say whatever the heck I want. Not to be a jerk-face about it — I’m not out to ruin anybody — but I value freedom.
PC: Have you achieved that freedom?
BD: You can never have total freedom, right? Whatever game you select, there are parameters, whether you’re playing pickleball or hockey, or Red Bull Rampage.
We all have these metric dashboards that we stare at that are kind of helpful and kind of the bane of our existence — Is this campaign working? Is this story working? Is this podcast working? Is anybody reading my newsletter? What do the charts say? And those are the parameters for our content/media/marketing game, and I’m beholden to that.
What I used to tell the staff at Velo when we were looking at these various metrics was, let’s do the easy wins where we get a big spike, like Specialized has a new Peter Sagan color for its shoes, and they send a bunch of sexy pictures, and it’ll take us about six minutes to rewrite that. We'll get a huge spike, and everybody else will have that same story, but that’ll make the bean counters happy. Let’s do a few of those, so that we can also do the passion projects where we invest a lot of time and do a lot of reporting and source it well. They may not get the biggest clicks, in fact, we're sure it won’t, but hopefully that will connect with a few people so they stick around for more.
That dynamic is the same whether you’re working in a content farm or you’re just out in this ocean by yourself in a one-man rowboat.
PC: Is that what it feels like? Like you’re running a one-person media company in a rowboat on the big ocean? You have so much experience, and you know the processes by which they would run the business.
BD: Maybe it’s arrogant to think of it like the world’s tiniest cycling media company, because there's just one of me, but I certainly prefer to think of myself that way than use the dreaded “I word” of being an influencer, even though maybe in some ways they're the same thing. What you're trying to do is build an audience and monetize it, right? That's the game, whatever you call it. It's the same dynamics just on a teeny, tiny scale.
PC: In a sense it’s tiny, but one of the challenges with media is that it’s hard to scale down, because you still have to do all the things, whether you’re one person or you're 10 people. How do you think about scaling for a one-person company?
BD: Pick a single medium, which for me was YouTube. You know, my skill set in descending order would be: Words, the typed word, the written word. Then photos, and video is a distant third, but going the Substack route didn’t seem that viable.
So trying to do all the things in all of the places, that’s hard for actual companies with staff doing it.
There’s a very large potential built-in audience at YouTube, so then it’s just a matter of my time.
PC: So YouTube was the obvious channel for you, because it had the monetization tools in place. It has the audience and the SEO. And you felt like the video was the place to be, even though you were a writer first?
BD: Yeah, I think so, because if I were to just do a website, I would have to sell advertising. And the reason so many of us have been cast out is because the business model broke for the media in general, and cycling media in particular, right? Selling static advertising hasn’t worked in 10 or 15 years when media brands are competing against Google and Meta. To compete as a one-man band, that was absurd.
YouTube has some built-in revenue. They get most of the ad money, but you get a portion of it. Not a great deal, but it is a deal. That’s probably like a quarter of my revenue, but the ability to have them host my videos and serve up my videos to a potentially large audience allows me to sell things like annual sponsorships, which are more than half of my annual revenue.
For event directors, I create and distribute course previews for them. If you’re looking to get people to your event, I’ve got an audience of 46,000 people who, on the grand scale of things, aren't huge, but they're all into gravel. So it's like 100% demographic crossover, right?
And so again, if I just had the same content, but on a personal website, who’s going there? Who’s finding it? Who’s reading that on a regular basis? So that’s why I went with YouTube. And periodically, I'll get people telling me, “Oh, you gotta do TikTok. You got to do this and do that.” And I’m like, “Well, I don’t. I don’t have the time for that, and I’m not confident that would lead to either a better quality product, or a better experience, or more money.”
PC: So some portion of your revenue comes straight out of YouTube ads. You have some portion that’s an annual sponsorship of The Ride. You do custom content production, and then you have affiliate revenue as the last slice of the pie?
BD: Affiliate revenue is the sprinkles on top. The best fit for me is I work with an outfit out of Oregon called BikeTiresDirect and their brand is non-denominational, which is a great fit for me, because if it was just a specific brand that would just come off as way too salesy. I’m very gun shy about selling on my site.
PC: There’s a very clear pool of content types on The Ride — Bike reviews is one big piece, accessories, behind the scenes event coverage and course previews. How did you settle into that? How long did it take to understand that these are the things that will work?
BD: I decided on gravel in general as compared to road, because gravel is growing, and it’s still weird. Most of the events are in North America, so it’s fertile ground and feasible for me to show up to these events and add something to the conversation.
Gravel is much more of a participation-focused thing than road. Not everybody that rides bikes cares about bike racing, but the audience for professional gravel racing is itty-bitty, right? So that’s why, with my event stuff, I target the participants. Here's this cool gravel stage race, and here’s what it’s like to do. And here’s what it looks like, and here’s the kind of bike to bring.
PC: In terms of content types and what you cover, do you keep plugging away at what you think is most important and wait for the algorithm to catch you? Or do you say, I know this is what’s working, so I’m going to start making it?
It’s 25 years of experience, of trying stuff and seeing what the audience responds to. Sometimes it’s hard work, and sometimes it’s just shiny new things.
BD: Kind of halfway in between. I probably should be better about paying attention to trends and trying to emulate those, but it’s just more iterative and nitty gritty. I don’t have some grand vision that I’m going to stick to, and no one can dissuade me from my beautiful vision. You know, it’s 25 years of experience, of trying stuff and seeing what the audience responds to. Sometimes it’s hard work, and sometimes it’s just shiny new things.
PC: Do you ever do videos that are sort of different to test how they’ll perform? I was thinking of the one where you were showing off the tools and the setup in your garage studio.
BD: Some of that is based on viewer feedback. I use Instagram as a kind of social chat room. I’ll just post pictures, and it’s like a casual chat. There was a friend who was asking, “What do you do in your garage? What are you using for bike hooks?” When you get a critical mass of that in Instagram, I think maybe that's what's worth doing a video on.
It’s just like a combination of gut feel, and following what I am interested in. I come back to the freedom part; I don't wanna just write the same story again or make the same video over and over. I wanna just show up and see what's there, and then go back and check what the metrics are saying. If something is only interesting to me and nobody else, maybe I should stop doing that. But it’s low stakes, that’s one thing that I like, so why not try different things? I can just make a video, put it out there and see what happens.
PC: Do you feel like what you have built as an individual is more or less uncertain than being an employee or working at a bigger media company?
BD: Prior to getting laid off twice, and seeing a lot of my friends getting laid off, I probably would have said that working for the man, working for a company is more stable. And in some ways, all the pieces are there for stability right off the bat. It feels stable, and I certainly miss having someone else set up retirement and 401k and insurance, but we are all well aware, you can get canned at the drop of a hat. So that’s stable, but not absolutely not guaranteed.
Working for myself, I don't have a guarantee of success by any measure, but if I’m going to lay myself off, I'll have a little bit of a heads up. And my little business model is somewhat diversified, so I’m grateful to have had the support of long-time sponsors. This is year three for me, and brands like Castelli, Feedback sports, etc., committed to this when it was just an idea and me waving my hands around in my kitchen. They keep coming back year after year, but should other sponsors drop out, I’m not dependent on one single company.
PC: There are lots of well known journalists starting personal media brands. Is there a community of people talking to each other, helping each other?
BD: There's a bit of a community and there’s camaraderie there. I think a lot of us miss the teamwork element. Even being introverted people, you like to have a bit of a community.
One thing that I’ve been enjoying is the mix of people. It’s both humbling for me and kind of invigorating. I think back to 10 years ago, when influencers would be invited alongside the media to product launches, and I was very dismissive. “Who are these punk ass kids with the super nice cameras to put pictures on their phones? And why are they here?” Then I realized that they've got a following that’s twice as large as ours.
Some of it is just nuts and bolts, like talking prices, like how much are you asking this company for? And what do you give in response? And just being pretty frank, how-do-you-do-business type of conversations.
PC: On all the channels, whether it’s YouTube, Spotify or Substack, the income and audience distribution is incredibly top heavy, like 99% of people have no revenue and then there are a few making millions. What do you think needs to happen for there to be more people like you in between?
BD: Shoot, I don't know. I think it was in your newsletter that I read something about Unilever moving half of its budget to creators. I mean, that could be one answer, right? Like the corporations pouring a bunch of money at it.
I think it’s good that success is not guaranteed, like all you have to do is show up and get paid. There needs to be some kind of value, and I’m trying to figure it out as I go. I don’t have a blueprint that works for everyone, but what has worked for me is building an audience, and on the commercial side, partnering with brands that buy into what I’m doing to help them get exposure to that audience in a legitimate way.
I'm super bearish on the membership subscription model, because I think initially, you can see creators get a nice bump from that. There are fans who are familiar with their work and say, “I want to support this person. They're going on their own.” But then after a couple years, they’re looking at their credit card bill like, what are all these charges for like? Why are we paying for this and that? I think that model is hard unless you have a really robust content machine.
What has worked for me is building an audience, and on the commercial side, partnering with brands that buy into what I’m doing to help them get exposure to that audience in a legitimate way.
PC: We're definitely at peak subscription. Someday I want to write an article about the value proposition of subscriptions. Most Substacks cost about the same as the New York Times subscription or even what Outside is doing. But one of them is a single person writing maybe two newsletters a week if they're really working hard, and the other is the New York Times, with more content than you could ever consume.
BD: Agreed, and I don't think it's the dollar amount. It's just one more thing. Whether the price is $9 or $13, or $24, that’s irrelevant to people who are coming to your site to think about spending $3,000 on a pair of carbon fiber wheels. It's not a price-sensitive thing, it's more like, “Do I really need this just one more thing?”
People are happy to support individuals even if they don't read the thing. They feel good about that, and they don't want to support corporations. Well, you realize that some of these individuals are the same exact individuals who worked at the corporation. We all go back and forth, because there’s like 12 of us, right? It's the same people essentially, but just that perception of helping out the little guy versus being a sucker for the man.
The intersection of online content and in-person experiences is something that works for me and for the media.
PC: Do you have a vision of where your business might be in 5 years?
BD: It's fuzzy but I'd like to have a couple people involved. Make it a little more professional and regular.
I hate the word ‘intersection,’ but like the intersection of online content and in-person experiences is something that works for me and for the media, and for some of the brands I'm working with. So I will just give an example of Castelli, which has been a supporter of mine and I'm happy to be super loyal to them because they've been super loyal to me. In their target space of gravel, I'm showing up to a lot of gravel events. I'll lead shakeout rides. I'll serve coffee in the Castelli booth and talk to people about what tires they should run, or different race tactics. Having that like in person interaction, even though it's with a pretty finite group of people, it's a lot more impactful than thumbing through content online. Hopefully when they go back home, my content might hold a little more sway than the content of someone who they've never met in person.
People, regardless of how monetarily wealthy we are or not, we only have a finite amount of time, and people are willing to spend money for experiences in-person. So having content that creates these experiences and content about those experiences, I think there's that helps connect people to doing their own stuff in the real world. So I think this is where I see a way forward. It's not just being behind a camera and having people receive that behind their phone. But also getting out and doing the thing that we're talking about.
PC: That's especially if you can do it on the gravel roads of Italy. Then you've won.
BD: Yeah, exactly.
Thanks for sharing this interesting exchange, Patrick. I’m not sure how far my perspective applies, but I felt compelled to chime in.
As a photographer working in the climbing world, often documenting significant ascents and first ascents, I’ve run into a frustrating pattern: when I share photos with athletes (always free of charge), within hours they’re scraped from the athlete’s Instagram by smaller online outlets. These platforms then build full articles around them, often without permission.
When I reach out, always respectfully, I typically get responses like “we’re non-profit,” “this is just a hobby,” or worse, “we have a right to use what’s online.” It’s exhausting. Most of the time, photographers let it go because the back-and-forth burns time and energy we’d rather spend creating. But that silence reinforces the perception that this behavior is acceptable.
It’s especially frustrating when these articles show up at the top of search results for major ascents, effectively capitalizing on work they didn’t commission or license. Ironically, they’d rather delete the post than pay a small usage fee or place a small banner linked to eshop with climbing prints.
I understand the challenges editorial outlets face today, but it leaves me wondering what sustainable models might exist. These photoshoots are rarely covered by brands, and editorial licensing has largely disappeared from outdoor marketing budgets.
Curious to hear how others navigate this space, I know I’m not the only one facing this.