OLD BIKES GO FASTER ON ‘THE BIKE SHED TIMES’
READER support for the ‘Bikes For Sale’ classified page has driven a record-breaking 2019 for Australia’s best online motorcycle magazine, The Bike Shed Times.
Figures released this morning show more than 100,000 visitors to the website for the year and more than 200,000 page views — both the biggest-ever numbers for a single year.
While most of the traffic (just over 150,000 views) was from Australia, and the United States was a distant second at a little under 15,000, we had visitors from 180 countries across the globe.
The Bike Shed Times Editor Peter Terlick said he was delighted with the performance of the website and particularly of the classifieds ‘Bikes For Sale’ page.
“Bikes For Sale attracted less than 50,000 visits in 2018 but more than 60,000 in 2019. That’s an increase of more than 20% in a year,” he said.
“But even more heartening was the amount of feedback we received on successful sales generated through our site. On multiple occasions we were able to find bike buyers within a couple of days of listing, in some cases after the bikes had sat unsold for months on other on-line forums.”
Mr Terlick said the introduction of a Facebook slideshow option had been particularly successful, in which sellers could have up to eight photos of their bike presented to The Bike Shed Times followers on Facebook.
“We use Facebook to put sellers’ bikes in front of our readers, then take them either to our main website for a closer look or to The Showroom website to see up to ten high-resolution images.”
The most-read article of the year was the story of Toad, a West Australian motorcycle collector who has accumulated hundreds of old unwanted bikes, including many dragged off rubbish tips in the 1970s. The article attracted about 6,000 visits when it was first published in 2017 and more than 20,000 visits in 2019.
