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Podcast: MTB Media is biased because brands pay advertisement?
Mountainbike media is weird. The new bike or product is launched; the review of it is on all the major news sites, and the ad is placed bold around it. This means the review is bought, right? The editors are biased, right? – But are they? There is an interaction between bike brands and component manufacturers, and yes, money is involved in different forms of advertisements. Banners, affiliate links, ambassadors, influencers and YouTubers.
In this podcast, I will try together with Gjulio and Simon from Bike connection agency to shed some light on the interaction of the media and the bike industry. How the media earns money to keep their outlets running and pay editors to do their work, how new forms of media arise, how we consume content, and how the landscape changes.
Podcast: 25 years of history in bike media. A retrospective with James Huang and Jens Staudt
Print was king regarding MTB media and our main source of information. There are only a handful of editors or writers out there which experienced this transformation to the media as we know it today. James Huang and Jens Staudt are two of these dinosaurs. In over 100 minutes of history in the development of bike media. Covering the rise of online reviews and online race coverage. The influence of people like Alex Rankin and Clay Porter, the rise of Pinkbike, centralization of power under media houses and some ideas on how bike people would like to consume information in the future.
Podcast: Paul Aston – Pushing Geometry and reliability of bikes
A good ol’ Mountainbike ramble. Paul Aston is not an unknown person in the bike media world. In this Testpilot Podcast we talk about, what he calls his „light bulb moment“ he had with a bike he first couldn’t really ride but made some geometry changes on to transform it to what he Called back then „the best bike ever“. A second light bulb moment with GEometron Bikes from Chris Porter. A little bit about his crowd funded testing of bikes and components on his website AstonMTB.bike.
Podcast: Dave Weagle – MTB design, kinematics pros and cons on linkage - Part 2 of 2
In one packed hour, Dave and Jens will try to explain, the complexity in bike design. They shed light on the advancing of bike technology and how we as humans are still the weakest part of it. How technology got better and how hard it can be to set it up. We dip on how to influence riding characteristic’s of a bike via kinematic design and head back to the 90s for the first steps with chain guides.
