Corona buries motorcycle magazines

The publishing world has been struggling for years with massive losses in the millions and billions. On the one hand, increasing digitization has led to more and more advertising customers migrating to Google and social media channels. On the other hand, even today only a small minority of readers are willing to pay money for a journalistic online article. Thus, on the one hand, publishers are losing revenue because of lost advertising money and shrunken print sales, while still keeping costs high for online editorial teams, which today are mostly not profitable. Readers and advertisers are actively supporting Google, social media and the like, thereby destroying genuine cultural assets. People don't even know what they're doing with it.

Now, in 2020, a German agent with predominantly motorcycle magazines has been hit. On February 4, 2020 Huber Verlag in Mannheim with 60 employees filed for insolvency after exactly 40 years of successful existence. Huber Verlag was the publisher of such well-known trade magazines as DREAM MACHINES, CUSTOMBIKE, BIKERS NEWS, TÄTOWIER MAGAZIN, TATTOO EROTICA, REISE MOTORRAD AND ROADSTER. In one fell swoop, six trade magazines disappeared from the German biker scene. In the meantime, the magazines DREAM MACHINES and CUSTOMBIKE are being published again by former editor Katharina Weber. but what does their future look like and what does she want to do better in order to live or survive with them?

Too often in this world the bores and conformists survive who produce a boring average magazine, without courage, without passion and the really innovative ones go under because they are not so dear child and do not have the same relations as the favored ones. Readers should already look a little closer at which magazines are produced with passion and innovation, and take more responsibility for the market and instead leave the boring 0815 industrial magazines on the side for once. This would at least preserve culture and innovation, the central strengths of Europe in the constant competition with unimaginative "copy" countries and the like.