Autosport magazine to stop printing magazines at the end of the year

[John Turner]

Originally Posted by hoffman66

You are right I don't read it, and only did very briefly. But I did buy it periodically in the 90's, but was always more and MN person.

But the times I did pick it up recently it was full of masses of pictures, a lot of F1 stuff (you are in the minority thinking otherwise looking at other forums and posters) very little text and was utterly worthless to me to read, I like to spend a few hours reading magazines and that has not been the case for quite some time.

4 quid for a weekly when most monthlys cost a fiver is utterly out of the park.

Well it's 2019 now! I'm sure my son and his editorial colleagues will appreciate that their efforts constitute a little and worthless text. I wonder what it is I've been reading then! Apples and pears comes to mind when comparing weekly mags with monthly ones.

[John Turner]

Originally Posted by Adam43

Would you pay £10.99 for them!?

Adam, very few would, I suspect, so we have to assume that is the intention.

Points on cost well made, although not sure when I last bought a pint for as little as £3!

[Peter Mallett]

It's still sad to see it go this way. I've only bought it sporadically and frankly I can't be bothered to sign up for the on line version since my interest in Formula 1, now eff 1, has diminished quite substantially. I do watch the highlights on C4 when I get the chance but that's about it. I wonder if I'm typical of the breed and that this is why the print editions are reducing in number (albeit still profitable).

The sport has changed dramatically; can't remember the last time I watched a rally since the current cars and rules don't attract me.

Obviously historic motorsport is of interest but I get plenty of that info from Goodwood and other similar sites. I can also afford to attend the events!

However this whole thing smacks of Liberty Medi, via Motorsport News, trying to control the content and output to their own ends (see the thread about photo copyright). I wonder if that has driven Zak B to resign from his non exec position.

[Adam43]

Originally Posted by John Turner

Points on cost well made, although not sure when I last bought a pint for as little as £3!

Me neither, but it was a number that I found in a survey. Apparently it is the national average.

[NaBUru38]

Are you sure it will stay as a weekly?

[Moneyseeker]

Originally Posted by Adam43

Print edition costs:
Motorsport £5.50
Autosport £3.99 (before the real outrage)
Motoring News £3.60
Loaf of bread £1.20
Pint of beer £3.00
Gallon of petrol £5.45

Considering the printing costs I’m not really sure it could be anything else.

Of course if you don’t feel it is worth it fair enough.

Pint of Peroni and bag of crisps in a London station pub £7.50....

Last time I picked up a copy of MN I am sure it was less than 50 pages. I know they are saying Autosport Show not affected but IMO that will end up with a show operator like clarion who run other car led shows at NEC. Looks like anything 'non-core' ie digital is vulnerable.

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[hoffman66]

I have worked in the media may years ago and know what it is like, am aware of the falling readership levels even then.

Simply put if you are charging a fiver for a monthly magazine then trying to charge just over a pound less for something that is printed every week is insane.

Yes Sunday papers are more expensive but they are stacked with material, Autosport and MN have not been that way for over a decade most weeks.

So charging more for less is crazy, you are basically saying that Autosport is worth 16 quid a month!

[Adam43]

£16? I’m not trying to make out it is nothing, but for a leisure activity it’s OK. About the same as a ticket to a championship team rugby match. For 80 minutes entertainment. Assuming I spend more than 20 minutes a copy it’s about cheaper.

I’ll take the argument that Motorsport is a bargain, but the old Autosport price is simply a result of the costs and was never going to be significantly cheaper. That’s all I’m saying.

[Moneyseeker]

Originally Posted by Adam43

£16? I’m not trying to make out it is nothing, but for a leisure activity it’s OK. About the same as a ticket to a championship team rugby match. For 80 minutes entertainment. Assuming I spend more than 20 minutes a copy it’s about cheaper.

I’ll take the argument that Motorsport is a bargain, but the old Autosport price is simply a result of the costs and was never going to be significantly cheaper. That’s all I’m saying.

I have been reading Autosport since 1980, back then it was the only place to read international and major UK series race results with motoring news, as it then was, covering the cubbies and rallying. I was a subscriber until probably 10 years ago but then found that most news was no longer news, so the magazine became padded out with more and more features and opinion pieces, inevitably some will be of more interest than others.

I now subscribe to the Autosport website, which I read daily and in fact as news alerts ping in, more than once a day.

This is where the divide comes, people who want news will find it online, people who want a long feature read are probably more motor sport magazine demographic, so both Autosport and F1 Racing are falling down the gap in the middle.

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[Fiorentina 1]

Autosport magazine is NOTHING to the motorsport dot com group, which owns something like 50 brands. The name as well as the show is more important than the actual print magazine to them.

Look who owns it and look at what happened to his other companies that he took public over the last decade. 2-minutes on google is all you need. It's crazy. I feel bad for people who actually lost money; investors, employees, advertisers, etc, etc.

We have no skin in the game. If we don't like the price, we won't buy it.... simples.

[Fiorentina 1]

Journalist named Fritz-Dieter Rencken came across this. He posted it on twitter. It's fascinating: https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/c...filing-history

[dwh43scale]

For the inquisitive, there is lots of publicly available information there. The challenge with large corporate groups is knowing what is really going off with inter-company liabilities, etc. At least two sources, who should know, have indicated that the weeklies were profitable - but it depends what other liabilities are then allocated to that part of the business. There is a fascinating thread on Twitter about how more and more debt was heaped upon Pizza Express ... leading to its present difficulties.

[Fiorentina 1]

BTCC champ is on the cover for the first time in decade, but no one will buy it at 11 quid. Stupid, beyond stupid....

[helgi]

So, some lads, called Yavor Efremov, Yura Barabash or whoever they are, having no previous presence in any king of auto racing, acted as directors of the company that somehow managed to buy almost all major websites, TV channels, photo archives and magazines to combine it under one F1 umbrella. Didn't they have to pay an astronomical amount of money for this? Who's behind the curtains? Liberty Group? Why did the previous bosses of Autosport sell their business to the people who know nothing about racing? Well, after FIA has destroyed all the prototype and junior competitive racing I won't be surprised it's a manoeuvre to destroy any form of pluralism in mass media concentrated upon F1. If any journalist expresses any doubts about the route FIA/Liberty have chosen, he will lost his actual job being put into blacklist.

[Fiorentina 1]

This is the main guy: Russian billionaire based in Miami. http://www.thepaddockmagazine.com/to...eople-2019/70/

[S griffin]

Nice to see a non F1 cover. However it seems there have been plenty of letters on the subject

[helgi]

Looks like that big business world - the part of it, which has never anything close to real production, but only "digital" (virtual) money - is so secret and difficult to understand. Would be great to read a complete explanation of the whole story with key figures in it. Are there any truly independent writers who brave enough to dig the story? Usually I don't like articles by Joe Saward but this one contains some interesting data:
https://joesaward.wordpress.com/2014...-the-f1-media/

[Adam43]

Just had a look, my 1990 Le Mans edition was £1.35. According to the Bank of England this is £3.01 in 2018 money (it doesn’t go to 2019).
Beer then was £1.06

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/mone...ion-calculator

So basically beer and Autosport has increased more than inflation in that time. The government is picking on me, specifically me. Grrrrrrr.

[coppice]

Thinking a little more about this , the recent target audience, F1 (and only F1 ) fans , don't buy motorsport magazines . But the people who do buy magazines (who are interested in the sport's broad church , including historic and national racing ,speed events etc ) don't want only to read more F1 drivel on the lines of 'the real reason why Seb lost at Baku '

[Sodemo]

Is £10.99 enough? I mean why not £20.99? £200.99?

[dwh43scale]

Wait, that's phase 2 of the strategy ...

[Adam43]

Originally Posted by coppice

Thinking a little more about this , the recent target audience, F1 (and only F1 ) fans , don't buy motorsport magazines . But the people who do buy magazines (who are interested in the sport's broad church , including historic and national racing ,speed events etc ) don't want only to read more F1 drivel on the lines of 'the real reason why Seb lost at Baku '

It would surprise me if people who like only F1 can actually read. Whereas people like me who follow many parts of Motorsport are intellectual heavy weights. Oh no, I let my Motorsport subscription lapse, I must be thick. Nooooooooo.

[NaBUru38]

A few more historic articles about F1 media by Joe Saward:

https://joesaward.wordpress.com/2013...edia-of-today/

https://joesaward.wordpress.com/2016...orsport-media/

[Fiorentina 1]

I'm curious what they plan to do for the USGP if anything? There's a big audience in the United States, and offering a free 7 trial to your website does very little if it expires October 31st and the US GP is in November. F1 Racing magazine, which is sold in all major book stores in the US arrives a month after you guys see it at WH Smiths. Ya, after Oct 31, therefore all 20 (yes 20) adverts on the Autosport Plus nonsense in this months F1 Racing Magazine is completely f-ing useless to those American readers. Pure comedy and stupidity....

I haven't bought an issue in over a year but I received the new one (Verstappen on cover) 3-weeks ago, from a colleague who came back from London.

Great planning boys....

[S griffin]

I find the voting for the awards has also gone downhill. Back in the day you could vote anyone or anything that fitted the award. Now you have a thin choice of four for each category