Car magazines have littered the racks of grocery stores, newsstands and big box retailers for decades. These magazines cover the trends, the products and the cool stuff coming down the pike in the world of cars. But just like with print in the rest of the consumer magazine industry, car magazines are experiencing somewhat of a decline in advertising and in circulation. The advertising part has more to do with the current economy, but the circulation problem has actually been moved over to the web, where people are increasingly looking at online car magazines.
An online car magazine is identical to a print car magazine, only here the magazine experience is more interactive in nature. By reading a car magazine online, a person could click on a link to an advertiser and be rerouted to that advertiser’s website within seconds. The reader too could click on a link within an article and be sent to the website that has the product or the trend in question available for sale or further research. This is most of what is so interactive about these car magazines online, but there are more interactive components too that print car magazines simply cannot match.
Car magazines that are exclusively available online are accessible through a subscription based service, just like magazines in print form are done. Some magazines do not require subscriptions, but they still are good because they literally hand deliver the latest issues when they come out to a person’s email inbox. By subscribing, a person too could be added to the subscriber listings of other similar magazines, ones that involve cars but ones that perhaps do not. With thousands of online magazines littering the web, the wave of the future is publishing these sites online, and the readership numbers definitely prove it.
Researching car magazines is fairly simple as well. It basically requires someone to look at a search engine and then plug in the keywords of interest. Also, someone with a subscription to a print magazine about cars could find the online version of that magazine and could subscribe just for the online portion. It sometimes is nice to touch and feel that print magazine, but with an online subscription paper can be saved and the environment could have a lesser impact. And of course, the technology and interactivity mentioned previously can make for some interesting conversation and some easier access to information about cars.
