Amazon for Guns: One Publisher’s Dream

You can’t buy guns online in the UK. You also can’t promote guns on Facebook’s marketplace, sell on eBay or even input keywords for Google Ads.

So how does a gun publisher effectively market its publications?

Hard to say, but Simon Barr, chief executive officer of field sports-focused media business Time Well Spent Group, sees an opportunity in an industry that tech giants have shied away from and is ready to invest in it.

“Silicon Valley doesn’t like the sector we operate in,” said Barr, whose company publishes titles like Shooting Times, Gundog Journal and Gun Mart.

Having “acquired all of our competition” on the newsstand in the past few years, Barr said TWS is now looking to build out its digital proposition, with affiliate revenue and an online marketplace among its top priorities.

He likened the idea to Autotrader, the online UK car marketplace that itself began life as a magazine, went public and is today valued at $10 billion.

As with guns, in the UK cars can’t actually be sold online. Instead, marketplaces match up buyers and sellers, and any exchange must be completed in person with legally-mandated paperwork. Unlike Amazon, which takes a cut of all sales on its platform, Autotrader makes much of its revenue by charging dealers to advertise their wares.

The notion of an online marketplace connecting gun buyers and vendors isn’t new: the U.S. has brands like GunBroker.com and Liberty Gun Trader, while the UK has businesses like GunTrader and TWS’ own Gun Mart. But Barr said the “incumbents” in the space haven’t “grabbed the opportunity by the horns, invested heavily into it and married it up with content. And that’s the thing that we’ve got lots of.”

TWS’s existing marketplace “is very rudimentary and ready to be taken to the next level,” he said. “This means we are not starting a marketplace from scratch, but we need to modernize the current offering and offer consumers a more complete offering.”

The Middle East Opportunity

Barr was speaking with AMO from Dubai, where he moved his family nine months ago to build the Gulf outpost of his other business, firearms-focused marketing and communications agency Tweed Media.

“We want to build a media network down here to be able to connect Western brands with Middle Eastern customers,” he said. “Nothing exists at the moment, so we’re almost in start-up mode.”

“We’ve consolidated the UK—the UK is fine, we know what we need to do there. But the opportunity to go into a virgin market with massive amounts of opportunity and wealth is significant, and the firearms laws are becoming less restrictive in the Middle East, and the interest in the subject matter is getting bigger and bigger.”

TWS (formerly named Fieldsports Press) acquired its first print title seven years ago and expanded rapidly in 2023 and 2024 when it snapped up a string of enthusiast brands covering shooting, fishing and country life from Future, Emap, David Hall Publishing and Bauer.

“The larger publishers out there decided that shooting titles didn’t necessarily fit with their ESG credentials,” Barr said. “And there was an opportunity for us too, given that we’re very passionate about the sector—we’re as much participants in the sector as we are professionals.”

It now employs around 50 full-time staff, with a wider pool of 150 freelancers contributing to its titles each month—up sharply from the 2023/24 financial year, when Tweed Media and TWS collectively averaged 15 employees.

The acquisitions collectively cost the company, which is run by Barr and his wife and chief operating officer Selena, “well over seven figures,” he said. One of the purchases was funded with private equity investment, he said, but the rest were paid for with cash generated by the business.

TWS “doesn’t have a huge amount of debt,” Barr said. “It does have some, but we’re able to manage that, and we’re acquisitive and we’ve got backing to go and do more things.”

In particular, Barr said the business was hoping to bolt-on a company that would bring in some digital capabilities—ideally one “within our sector that is already successful, this could be an online well optimised retailer, a gun classified site or a forum. There are a number we have our eye on and are talking to.”

Trying to find people with digital skills that want to come and work in our funny businesses, with the subject matter, is a challenge. And everybody that’s good at digital is in high demand at the moment from publishers. So we feel that if we can acquire a business that already has the know-how, it’s a one-plus-one-equals-three effect.

He added that it would ideally be in an adjacent field: “We don’t have any appetite to buy a cycling magazine, or a golf magazine.”

At present TWS’ annual revenue is £5 million ($6.8 million) of which half comes from advertising and half subscriptions and newsstand sales. It does not run events “yet,” he said.

The business has a profit margin of around 10%, which Barr hoped to ultimately double with a view to either exiting or expanding once again, although he acknowledged they have “a long way to go.” A fifth of the company’s revenue today comes from digital sources, which he wanted to increase to half.

“That’s where I think our revenue growth is going to come from, so that we’re not so reliant on the legacy print business, which has so many variables outside of our control—paper prices and macroeconomic factors on advertising and newsstand sales and all those sorts of things… If we can get part of the retail channel, the sales are still there.”