Launching a niche media outlet with affiliation – the example of French media Transition Vélo

Launched by three cycling-loving journalist friends in 2023, Transition Vélo is a French niche online media outlet focusing on the world of cycling.

With the slogan “Be well informed, be well equipped, ride better”, the independent media outlet addresses all moments on a bike, whether it's for everyday travel, weekend rides or more sporty activities.

They want to share the latest cycling news and help you find the right equipment through comparisons, tests and trials of bikes and accessories.

From the beginning, they opted for an affiliate-based strategy to ensure revenue and develop their media. Little by little they also started to have advertisers.

Even though they have built an average audience of 300,000 visitors per month and have developed affiliation and advertising revenue, the media outlet is still struggling to pay its three founders. With the aim of diversification, they also developed their YouTube channel.

The Fix Spoke to Rémi Jacquet, one of the cofounders.

How did the idea of Transition Vélo come about?

We are three friends passionate about cycling. We were working for a media outlet that was bought out, so it made us want to explore new areas.

We realised we weren’t finding exactly what we were looking for in terms of cycling in the media, like how we equip ourselves or which bike we choose. So we decided to create this media outlet in 2023.

And you started with an affiliate strategy?

Yes, we had acquired this experience of affiliation with our former employer, which meant that we had a certain vision of the way we wanted to do things, very focused on the product, product testing, and advice before purchase, ultimately, while working as much as possible with the affiliation.

We are not trying to become millionaires by launching this media outlet, but it’s more about being able to create something that we are proud of with very few ads on the website.

We wanted to keep something very refined and sober. We knew that affiliation could give us a little more freedom from that point of view, to be a little less dependent on advertising alone. It's true that today, when you're a media outlet, the sources of income are quite limited, so affiliation seemed to us to be a good second leg with advertising, since we couldn't see ourselves launching a paid media outlet.

How did you start doing affiliate marketing when no one knew you?

Our former bosses created a company called Affilizz, which brings together all the affiliate platforms to make things easier for publishers like us. As a publisher, we have a kind of search engine that will automatically search for products offered as affiliates.

It’s a good option to avoid trying to manage everything one by one, especially when you are a small structure, because there are dozens of affiliate platforms. Today we are going a little bit beyond that because it is a good base, but there are still limits, not everything is available with this tool there.

How does your affiliate strategy work?

We work with this platform that opens the doors to affiliate marketing with several hundred merchants. However, a significant portion of our affiliate revenue comes from major players in the e-commerce sector: Amazon, Alltricks, and Decathlon, among others.

Potentially, any company that sells products online is a partner for us. Obviously, we work primarily with online stores that sell products related to the world of cycling. We work with both big names, as well as smaller companies and even modest bike manufacturers who sell their bikes directly.

Affiliate percentages vary significantly depending on the partners and even the products offered by each partner. The range is generally between 3 and 10%.

Is affiliation still at the heart of your strategy today?

At first, it was 80% for a while; today, it's more like 50% of our revenue. We managed to develop the commercial side a little, so we have advertising or sponsored videos, which also allows us to earn money.

It also varies a little depending on the month. If we have brands with whom we have more important projects in certain months, that will shift the balance. Affiliates are also a lever that's quite sensitive to promotional periods and the end of the year. It's still business, in a sense.

So the bicycle market is also a cyclical and seasonal market, we’re going to have a real peak in spring, at the beginning of summer and back to school too. The end of the year, as for all sectors, is a bit of a strong moment too.

What about your audience?

On average, we fluctuate between 180,000 and 300,000; we've even had months with 400,000 unique visitors. Some periods are a little stronger than others, like at the start of the school year.

Depending on the month, we're talking about up to 40% of the audience compared to the previous year. In 2024, I think we had 1.8 million visits, and for 2025, we're already at 1.4 million. So, we should see fairly significant growth.

You also launched your YouTube channel?

Yes, it is something we didn't necessarily think about doing from the start because we didn't have the skills to do it. All three of us were journalists, we knew how to be in front of a camera, not necessarily behind it, or do the editing. It's something we learnt.

And ultimately, it's something that took off quite quickly for our YouTube channel. Today, we have a little over 10,000 subscribers, and we've set up a weekly program called “L'Actu Vélo, à Vélo" (Bike News by biking), which works quite well, bringing together a group of up to 10,000 people each week around cycling news.

I think it's not necessarily a good thing to be on just one medium. It's good to have these two mediums. It allows us to do things that are a little different, to offer content to such different audiences because we don't have the same people reading us as those who watch us on YouTube.

Do you also do affiliate marketing on YouTube?

We cover a lot of highly produced topics, as well as projects and more societal topics like the role of cycling in cities, and that sort of thing.

We realise that affiliation also works on YouTube. We have certain videos that perform quite well. When it comes to products, YouTube has become a search engine in its own right for a large proportion of people. Ultimately, it's also where they come to find out which products to buy.

How do you see the future? What are your challenges?

The major one is that we're at a stage where we're not able to pay all three of us, but only one of us. We are not surprised because we expected it, but we have no doubt that it will come because we're seeing trends that are quite positive, whether in terms of revenue or audiences. We set ourselves a target of about four years to reach that level.

We're entering the most difficult phase of the project, which is the phase where we're big enough to say that we can't give up anymore and not big enough for things to run smoothly enough for everyone to be well off. This is a phase where you have to hang in there and keep going. Afterwards, the difficulty, in my opinion, is time. The bicycle market is a market where there's really a lot to tell, a lot to do.

Source of the cover photo: Noralí Nayla via Unsplash