Factory Media, the publishers of Outdoors Magic, Bike Magic and various other outdoor-related web sites including six bike sites and another ten outdoor sites, has informed its creditors that it has gone into voluntary liquidation.
Factory media news item
Outdoors Magic is one of the older outdoor sites on the internet and has gone through various different stages of ownership since originally being set up in around 2000 by the company Magicalia Ltd. In June 2016 it was sold to Factory Media to add to their other, mainly bike-related brands.
Back in 2012 Factory Media was riding high and published 19 magazines and 25 sports web sites and its digital offering MPORA.COM. It was sold by the Foresight Group to the Forward Internet Group for around £8M. Since then the print magazines have been reduced and the company appears to have been struggling for the last few years and experienced difficulties with managing the new GDPR regulations.
It remains to be seen what the receivers will do with the component parts of the business but it seems unlikely that the creditors will see much of the monies owed. Our sympathy goes out to the employees and creditors who are affected by this.
In June 2011 Factory made a concerted effort to buy UKClimbing Limited. We resisted this at the time since we weren't convinced that they would keep the site going in the way we wanted. Earlier that year they had bought BikeMagic from Magicalia and it appeared that they wanted to use that site to bolster their print magazines, which seemed to be the wrong way round to us.
UKClimbing Limited, the company behind UKClimbing.com, UKHillwalking.com and Rockfax, remains in private ownership with no third party shareholders and this is the way we intend to keep it for the forseeable future. All profits we make are invested directly back into the business and we are committed to providing content which is in line with our reader's interests of climbing, hillwalking and outdoor sports. This includes the advertising which is used to fund the website as well as the news, articles and functionality which we offer.
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