The Car and Driver magazine is experiencing the same problem that the majority of the industry is - their subscriptions and ad sales are falling. Subscriptions, which are currently at 1.3 million, have dropped by around 3 percent from last years' first half. Newsstand sales dropped by a huge 8.6 percent, while ad pages declined by another big 7.7 percent, according to Ad Age, citing the Publishers Information Bureau.
An interesting insight into Car and Driver's web site, is that the visitors are a different demographic than the print magazine enjoys. Around 80 percent of their online visitors aren't subscribers and fans, but rather are doing research to determine if they want to buy a car or not; something that many online sites are visited for.
While Car and Driver has several large print competitors, their online rivals are far more and quite a bit ahead of them in unique visitors and page views.
"We wanted more space in the magazine to be more graphically interesting," said Csaba Csere, editor in chief of Car and Driver, "And we hope we can drive more people to the web. We can also put more in the bar graph on the web."
Car and Driver does have a dilemma here. Their Web site is attracting those that will consider them a commodity; a place to check out cars before buying. What they need is to drive their print readers to the Web site and become consistent visitors.
One of the ways they're attempting to do this is through importing some of the print magazine features to the Web site. The biggest move here is probably taking the bar graph consumers are used to in the print magazine and putting it online. They use it to compare road-test vehicles with 3 competitors.
They do have to be careful in their drive to get more viewers not to turn the online magazine into a general audience Web site, rather than a site for automobile enthusiasts.
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