Ryan, you have clearly done what you know to be the best approach with the HAMB and your other efforts. Works for me. I lost all my collection of magazines and books 20 years ago in a basement flood - have not really saved that sort of item since. The information available on the net and, more to my interest, right here, is just more than my '68 year old brain can ever absorb. No need to start another collection of stuff. Thanks for what you do and, plan to do. Good on you.
hunh? did you read the same thing I did, he said it was overvalued. I've priced it, it is. Selling the magazines at a loss to generate subscription numbers to pump up ad prices is a dead model. I see that. It is also really hard to track despite you saying you can track every sale and call from print, really? wow.
creativity really has little to do with ad effectiveness. You can have the most creative ad in the world, if the message doesnt get across, the medium doesnt fit or the target audience does see/hear it... its a flop. its a combo of many things that make a great ad... placement, message, timing, media.... the list goes on and on. Creativity is but a small part of it. can creativity sell a shitty product? For a while, yes. if you have a great product do you need a really creative ad campaign to sell it? Nope. its a mix.
This just sucks. When I'm on the computer I'm usually here, When I'm not online I got my face stuck in a magazine. The upside is now my magazines will be worth something. I knew holding on to every single one I buy was a good idea.
I used to have 2 boxes full of magazines every year from the newsstands, and it took 20-30 years to finally decide that most had to go into the trash. Now.........well, I don't crack open a page anymore. Same old shit.
Apparently HRM sucked at one time and featured nothing but Camaros, I guess I'm too young to know. What I do know is they changed their format a couple of years ago and I have been pleased by every single issue since.
Here's something that's bothering me about this thread. A lot of you guys are acting like you can only read one thing and that's that. Is it really a choice you have to make? This month I will read either a) the HAMB b) HRM or c) R&C? I read so many magazines and forums and web sites it would make your head spin. I subscribe to half a dozen and buy off the newsstand too. I love automotive media period. Sure there are crappy titles out there that I don't read, but I thrive on the good ones and read all I can get my hands on.
And, notice the newspaper people are seeking their OWN protection/bailout these days! Their product sucks in every way, and no one wants to buy their fish-wrap, so now they feel entitled to stay in business through gub'mint money! The magazine world isn't much better. Thing is, if they'd simply put out a top quality product that people WANT and make it affordable, it will sell. If it's crap, and full of advertising, it goes tits-up, as it should! When I sold trailers, I advertised in the phone book, had signage on my truck, and in front of my business, and a couple of other methods. When I had a customer come in, I always asked "How did you hear about my business?"...Most called from either my truck sign, saw my frontage signage and stopped in, or saw my ad in the phone book. I advertised in the newspaper a few times, and NEVER had one customer reference the newspaper ad! Newspaper/print media has been going downhill for quite some time, starting with when USA Today (aka "McPaper") came out in the early '80s. The large papers in this country are hemmoraging money by the millions - look at the NYT, Washington Post, and the LA Times, to mention a few. The Seattle P-I and the Rocky Mountain News just went belly-up, and are ONLY available online! Ironic, no? Plus, the print media have exactly zero credibility these days, anyway! Auto magazines don't have the political agenda that newspapers and "news" magazines have, but the quality of the product has suffered, nonetheless! Readership is way down, subscriptions are fewer, and ad prices are up! It's a formula rife for failure! And, if some of the favorites go under, that is the way it goes. I used to subscribe to nearly all of the Mopar magazines, as well as Car Craft and Hot Rod. These days, it's just CC and HMN. That's all. The Mopar magazines basically suck these days, and HR hasn't been the same since Baskerville died. I've been a CC subscriber since 1974, so I've seen their swings from weird to goofy, from vans to Camaro Craft, from Pro Street to Real Street, and all of the little trends along the way. They are quirky enough that I like CC.
If you have an MBA, then it is not considered criminal. At least not in a court of Law. Chapter 11 "protection" makes it too easy for these clowns to weasel out of their obligations. Just wait until Detroit sticks it to their pensioners, the same way the big steel companies did.
When you have corporate raiders like Ron Burkle coming in and basically pillaging a profitable company into bankrupcy, there is little hope that they will survive. Burkle will walk away with millions and start looking for his next conquest. Even though all of this is legal, it sure smacks of being un-american to me.
Not really when you think about how much time a person actually has each day to devote to reading. My choice, read a car mag or read a car related forum with content that is actually fresher and udated by the minute. Hey....do we live in the same house??? I hhope you hire a proof-reader. There really is only so many hours in a day. Most people have to choose how to spend their "down time" between family, friends, hobby, garage time, housework, reading/internet, etc. and the time that use to be spent reading print mags has now been replaced by reading the same content, if not better, on the internet.
Interesting thread, there are as noted 3-4 things happening right now: -SourceInterlink had too much debt after their purchase all of the new magazines, and like other companies that just bought assets and companies in 2007, they are unable to survive without a change (BK). Same is true of other companies that made major purchases in the last couple years. -Print advertising dollars for magazines is on the decline. -Print magazines are trying to bring articles to press faster, no more of that 6 month delay (at least in the case of OT GM High Tech Magazine). Even Frei mentioned it in his return editorial, that who wants to buy a mag and read about something you read on the web 4 months ago. IMO HRM has a future. I resubbed. HRM has a circulation of like 250-500K I forget the actual number. Dave Frei's website failed (not him) because it was going to take longer for the site to cash flow, and the investors pulled the plug too soon. They were also selling ad's in the vids, and I think that's a hard way to do it IMO. I co-founded, ran, and sold www.ls1tech.com. Site has/had 130-175 advertisers. Good bang for the buck was my approach. I have done some freelance for GM High Tech Magazine, and I have a grasp of how folks are paid and how it works. There will be a place for magazines like these, because they have a good following. Just my 2 cents. I respectfully don't know if I totally understood Ryan's point about how the online community will benefit. Online already has carved out a sizable chunk of the available advertising and that will continue a bit more. I think print is evolving as much as the budget allows.
Attention everyone. I will now point out the grossly obvious. Remember the huge assortment of porn mags that used to be behind the convenience store counters? Of course you did. Ever notice those stores now have maybe 3 or 4? Of course you do, you just weren't counting mags, you were ogling boobies. It's a natural response. But now that we've pointed it out...... If you can't sell magazines full of porn-porn, how the hell will you ever sell mags full of car-porn? The world's oldest profession is not automobile customizing. No amount of "writing" will ever revive print media unless society miraculously changes course. Technology has spoken. Movies are both talkies and technicolor. Yes you can tell great stories without either. But the public won't pay for it. Guess what? Print went technicolor a while back. Now it finally goes talkie...........
You forgot company C. Which is company A, after the sole proprietor dies, his family has to sell it to pay the estate taxes, because he was too successful. It then becomes company B, like Peterson Manufacturing (Vicegrip)did. I can name many others. A lot of them are farmers.
I used to have 14 Subs. Hot Rods, Bikes, Classic Cars ( mostly Brit Mags ), Race Cars ( Brit & US ), As well as buying seperate issue's ranging from VW's to Tuners, Airplanes, etc... If a Machine caught my eye, I bought the Magazine...
porn got screwed because they started giving the content away for free. Just at taste to get you to sign up online. At first it worked. Porn sites made bank, I know of few of the publishers... LOTS of cash. But the industry killed itself with more and more predatory practices. Now you can get all the porn you want for free on the net. Publishers, even the big ones, are struggling. The same thing happened for newspapers. They chose not to charge for their online content, and its killed them. TV and films have felt a little of it... The difference being the quality of the content. It still takes big dollars, effort and talent to put out a GOOD TV show or film. You can watch all the privately made crap you like on YouTube, its not going to stand up quality wise to what comes out of the major studios. The net has eaten into viewership, but not because of better quality content, its just a time in the day issue. Print will find its salvation in the same form. GOOD content. Publications with lower quality content will not survive. People will pay for good writing and good photography. Print needs to concentrate on what it does well and hammer away at it like no one else can. anyone can write a story, but yet people still buy books by Shakespeare.
This whole thread is really "inside baseball" for the web vs. print preachers. His implication was that print advertising doesn't work so "...any magazine that depends on advertising to survive will fail." Strong opinion, and I can understand his motive for saying it. Hey, I love the books published by Church (own'em all), and other privateers - but they are not magazines, they are limited run books. They're art. I love this and many other online sources too. But it's not one way or the highway IMO. And your assement that that advertising is overvalued assumes - 1. That you in fact don't have any real method of measuring return so you can't tell whether your money is well spent. 2. That you have no defined marketing targets or objectives for your ad program. and 3. That you just pay the ratecard price for the ad space and accept the "total readership" b.s. And yes, it is common for major marketers to track every call from print ads (not by asking "where did you hear about us?"), capture data for outbound future contacts, and determine exactly which calls resulted in a sale. It's not easy but it is essential to keeping ad costs in the "correctly valued" range. Okay, lets get back to hot rods (the cars, not the magazine). Peace.
That worked for me, and it was very accurate, for my purposes. Of course, mine was a family business and not a "major marketer" as you say. Every call or visit from a customer, the question was asked. And that helped me spend my ad dollars wisely; not just "guessing" what worked.
I know shops that advertise in car magazines , they get 2 bursts of calls , when the magazine is delivered to the subscribers and then when the magazine hits the newstand , other than that its just a trickle , Also if there is a screw up and their ad does not get in , well the phone does not ring that month, So advertising does work, but you need to make $$$$ from that phone call, if your sales guy are not selling or your product is oversold in the market than all the ads are never going to make you money. I am sure insiders smarter than I am can also tell you how you need to buy space on the newstand , buy back the unsold magazines and lots of other BS that has left most magazines off the newstand at Walmart and other large retailers. Magazines will always be here, right now there is a glut , 10-20-30% will be gone , hopefully the rest will get better because of it ........and in 10-20 years we will go thru this again. Yes I have boxes of Hot Rod and Road and track etc that I often do back and look at..... Chris
Well, this place is great, but in all honesty, I spend my cash on print. I come here 'cuse it's free...
maybe take some of that cash and become a ALLIANCE MEMBER!...................................I understand this will thin out the herd but thats fine, I spend half my time rereadin the mags I have from the 50s thru the 80s
I agree, there should be some kind of compromise from what happens between the magazines (pimping products for there advertisers, that are paying for ad's) and the guys that are bashing stuff in the forums. Honest reviews compared to statements with no basis or data to back up their claims.
Make a bunch of cool shirts to advertise your cool blog, sell them at a reasonable price to die hard fans who then spread the gospel to the target. That's creative!
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