When Wallace launched CyclingTips, he was hardly a cycling insider. “I was just a nobody kind of bike racer,” he said. “I never did anything significant in the sport, but I loved it. I lived and breathed it.”
His early posts were small observations from Melbourne’s Beach Road, one of the country’s most popular riding routes. His imagined audience was the hundred or so fellow cyclists he knew personally. At the time, there was little expectation that online cycling coverage could become a business.
CyclingTips grew gradually but organically. “Other blogs might start putting me on their blogroll… there was no social media at this time.” Wallace wrote race reports, training advice, nutrition guides, and interviews with professional riders — interviews he landed simply because he happened to know amateur racers who knew professionals on the circuit. His lack of journalistic training, he believes, helped him stand out.
“I might not ask, ‘What are your goals coming up?’ and these typical questions,” he said. “I might ask, ‘What kind of food are you eating before a race?’ or ‘What happens in the hotel room when you’ve got downtime?’”
Those small details appealed to readers hungry for authenticity. Before long, advertisers began noticing too.
The first ad came from a cycling magazine promoting its Tour de France edition. “They asked if they could advertise and I was like, I guess? I don’t know — how does $200 sound?” Wallace said. A second advertiser soon followed, and the realization dawned that the site might become something larger than a personal journal.
Hiring, Scaling, and the Facebook Era
By 2013, Wallace hired his first employee: editor Matt de Neef. It was the moment CyclingTips transitioned from a one-man blog into a professional media operation.
“That was one of the biggest decisions of my life,” Wallace said. “It was a really awkward transition of like, this is Wade’s personal blog. Now somebody else is both writing for it and commissioning content.”
But the gamble paid off. Readers didn’t care that Wallace wasn’t writing everything anymore — they cared that the content remained good. CyclingTips expanded its coverage into international racing, gear reviews, culture pieces, and event reporting. It built a reputation for depth and personality in a sport dominated by more traditional outlets.
Then came Facebook.
“I remember we were getting a thousand followers a day,” Wallace said. “We would do everything — events, merchandise, a marketplace… on paper, it all fed into each other.”
The advertising business boomed, driven in part by cycling’s gear-heavy consumer ecosystem: bikes, wheels, helmets, apparel, gadgets. But Wallace soon learned the vulnerability of relying on platforms. Around 2018, Facebook restricted the visibility of Australian publishers, causing CyclingTips’ traffic to “go to zero really quickly.”
“That was a big eye-opening thing,” he said. “We depended on Facebook, and our ad business relied on traffic.”
Even as the commercial side remained profitable, Wallace increasingly disliked the ad-driven business model. “You wake up January 1st, and you had a sales team running around getting ads… and you’d have to say, ‘Great job, now let’s increase that by 30 percent.’ I hated every minute of that part of the business.”
CyclingTips experimented with memberships as early as 2017, offering members-only content, events, and eventually a metered paywall. The move didn’t transform the business, but it planted the seeds for Wallace’s next chapter.
Paywall incoming…
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