Motor Racing Magazines - read 'em before they die.
After the announcement that Autosport is to go monthly, I delved into the sales history of some of our favourite UK racing titles. The results are not 'happy reading.'
The first time I chose to purchase Autosport magazine was back in the summer of 1985. That issue had a Ferrari F1 car on the cover and delivered a report of the San Marino Grand Prix from the week before. I read the magazine cover to cover. Twice. It was the start of an addiction as far as motor racing magazines go.
The recent announcement that Autosport is moving to a monthly format was a bit of a surprise, and I suppose in some ways it makes sense. The collapse in print sales for most racing magazines (which is a part of the shift in print product decline in general) has hit Autosport hard over the last quarter of a century. Back in 2000 the title shifted on average 61,025 copies per week. The last audited year currently available – 2023 – has an average of 5,847 print copies per issue being purchased. The digital revolution that was supposed to save publishing has never arrived. The records show that 7,056 digital copies move online, but also that 5,009 of those are bundled rather than being individual purchases.
ABC - Audit Bureau of Circulations Limited - has collated data for publishing since 1931. The latest year for all publications they collect data for is available to the public. To members the certificates back to 2000 are available for a number of titles. As a publisher myself for the last seven years (Touring Car Magazine, formerly Motor Racing UK) and as an academic researcher currently in my ninth year of investigating the motor racing magazine industry, I use ABC on a regular basis, and understand some of the flaws that have hindered their systems over the years.
Each year a new certificate is issued for each magazine and is of great importance, mainly because it is the first port of call to prove to potential advertisers how many copies of are sold. It does not however indicate reach. The rule of thumb in the print industry is that each issue of a magazine or newspaper will be ‘thumbed’ by three people, it’s the kind of spiel that advertisers are often sold on – whether that is accurate for all publications is highly debatable in an era where print has receded at the rate it has in the last 25 years. For example, prior to the Covid lockdown, Motor Sport Magazine would be found in dental waiting rooms and aircraft lounges across the country – to the tune of 4,000 copies per issue, also popping up in hotel foyers and the like. Those 4,000 copies could easily be shown to potential advertisers as having a reach greater than 12,000.
As a note, the media pack for Business of F1 magazine claims that their reach is up to 10 readers per issue – with 40,000 readers – I’ll leave you to work the maths out in terms of how many copies are published, and where they are placed. Business of F1 is not an audited title so figures from the publisher are to be taken at face value.
In short before running through things, and for those who want just the headline numbers, I’ll offer up the average sales per issue for a number of magazines in 2000, and their averages in 2023 (if you’re more dedicated I’ll take you through other years after this.)
Sales per print issue 2000 vs 2023
Autosport:
2000 – 61,025.
2023 – 5,847.
F1 Racing/GP Racing:
2000 - 96,784.
2023 – 13,918.
Motor Sport:
2000 – 35,049.
2023 – 19,985.
Motorsport News:
2000 – 40,043.
2017 – 6,354. Motorsport News delisted from auditing at the end of 2017, after moving from Haymarket to Autosport Publishing, before being sold on to Kelsey Media.
Over the years the ABC methods of data presentation on their certificates has changed in a number of ways, which has at times led to misinterpretation. A problem that has affected some magazines on this list, or rather, across the wider magazine/print industry has been a lack of de-duplication.
The magazines we’re looking at didn’t record digital issues before 2011 (and even at that point the totals were minimal) but through the last decade magazines across the board have audited numbers that aren’t telling the full truth, with results appearing on those certificates. That was not a case of some kind of hoodwinking on the part of the publisher, merely the way in which the auditing process could lead to totals that would look much better on the surface.
Subscription bundling (where a subscriber receives a print issue, but also receives a digital issue) has at times skewed numbers. ABC did shift to show this in the years before the Covid lockdown, and from 2021 ABC started offering separate certificates for print and digital, with a third overall ‘Brand Report’ collating both - along with some social media interaction numbers (essentially a chance to show how many likes there were on Facebook – which on its own without other platforms is a pointless exercise.) Website stats are not available in the auditing, although there was at one point an attempt to cover that area. Autosport.com for the month of March 2000 (440,772 users and 10-million-page impressions if you’re wondering) is one example. There is no official way to gauge the success of pure online.
As for the magazine – back in 2000 Autosport was shifting 61,025 copies per week on average. This worked out as being split in this fashion. 47,207 copies were purchased from newsstands/supermarkets etc as single issues, with 42,337 of those being purchased in the UK and ROI. Subscriptions accounted for 13,302 copies, of which 9,165 were in the UK and ROI. Overall from subs and singles 9,158 copies were sold outside of the UK and ROI. Around 500 of the total would be handed out as freebies.
Not every issue would move North of 61,000 copies however. Seasonal variances have always been an influence on motorsport magazine sales. Prior to the Formula One season, especially in pre or early internet days, the totals in February and March would always be the highest of the year. In 2001 the average sales per issue ran at 57,190 copies, with a February issue moving 74,347 issues, and a November one selling 46,323. Again, something today that advertisers have to take into account.
F1 is king at Autosport. More than once it has been admitted that sales drop dramatically if F1 is not on the front cover, with two exceptions over the last few decades. The Le Mans special issues and the British round of the World Rally Championship. It was suggested by one former editor that a ‘normal’ weekly issue of Autosport would see sales drop by up to a third if something other than F1 was the cover story.
During print dominated times – even when sales were falling – on track events could have an effect on sales. In 2002 and 2003, the third and fourth Michael Schumacher and Ferrari titles in a row, which included a championship crowning at the 2002 French GP in July, sales slumped.
Both Autosport and F1 Racing were hit in that period. F1 Racing went from 101,055 per issue in 2001 to 85,136 and 67,683 in the following two years (before going up in 2004.) Autosport lost 7,000 purchasers per issue from 2001 to 2002, with another 5,000 readers ditching out to bring the average for 2003 to 45,175. From 2000 to 2004 a little over a quarter of the readership had ditched out. It was an accelerated change. At the time members of the FIA were concerned that Ferrari dominance was bad for business, with this being a reflection of that Max Mosley warning.
The fall off over the next four years was 10,000 readers, by 2008 Autosport was shifting 34,442 copies per week, and the magazine went through a refresh that was intended to mirror the reading habits of an audience that was becoming used to the ‘chunking’ format of online coverage.
For the entire print industry freefall was in effect. Through the PhD I’ve been researching across the last couple of years I’ve researched how digital journalism has affected print journalism, in terms of how the skills developed for current trends bounces back into features, and how reading habits have developed. Many magazines attempted to change their style to fit into a digital look, for the most part it was a repackaging. Over the years race reporting for Formula One has moved from a linear A to B style, to packaged pop outs of information. An argument against magazines doing that is the idea that it could – and in some cases has proven to – alienate readers who want to step away from online writing styles. If you are losing readers to online, do you adapt to them in the hope that they remain, or do you plan a different, smaller future with an ‘older’ style in an attempt to retain that core audience who don’t want an online look to their print purchases?
In an academic sense, without recording details, Nigel Roebuck could be an apocryphal sidebar. On a fair number of occasions while speaking with various people from within the motorsport media business, the motorsport industry and motorsport fans, when I explain my research, or of talking about Autosport in particular, the name Nigel Roebuck comes up. In generalising the conversations - and it is usually with older, lapsed, Autosport readers, Roebuck is brought up as the starting point from the mouths of the other party. ‘Fifth Column was always my first read on a Thursday’ would often be in there. ‘I loved the Roebuck Grand Prix reports’ is another.
I’m guilty as charged there too. Fifth Column, and the sidebar news would be my first read in the pre-internet days in Autosport. Opinion and gossip. If it is a criticism that online writing focusses too much on that, isn’t it in a way a double standard that those of us starved of ‘inside’ access in those days criticise that current lean? When newspaper coverage and Ceefax page 360 filled the gap between the Sunday chequered flag and a Thursday morning, didn’t most of us go to find out why what Mansell and Senna said about one another, or the real reason why Morbidelli retired the Minardi. Again.
In the digital era the PDF or App based magazine was supposed to be the saviour, but why pay for that when you can get information from other sources for free on the internet?
The 2014 certificate for Autosport states an average of 22,963 of each issue across the year. 20,693 in print, 2,882 in digital. The breakdown can be seen below:
Earlier this year Motor Sport Magazine pointed out that their circulation was now at 41,139 per issue after the ABC results were released.
Motor Sport article on their 2023 ABC results - is it accurate?
The article/report shows in which areas it had grown as it maintained its position as the best-selling print racing magazine in the UK. The magazine has been the most resilient in the period of 2000 to 2023. From sales of around 35,000 at the start of the millennium, the magazine slipped to 26,000 by 2006 and back up to 35,000 by 2012.
For 2023 the actual print total was 19,985, and the digital was at 21,154, but in reading the report there was this asterix added by ABC:
The interpretation being that 29,770 issues were purchased, of which 9,785 were digital without a print copy. This note has appeared on the last three certificates from Motor Sport. Their digital totals for the last few years have been thus:
2018 – 2,541
2019 – 2,324
2020 – 2,909
2021 – 12,977 (9762 bundled)
2022 - 15660 (11580 bundled)
2023 - 21154 (11369 bundled)
The 2020 report for Motor sport states a total circulation monthly of 23,056 across digital and print.
The miscount of digital has been a problem for a number of years, as is seen from this update from the 2019 audit of F1 Racing.
For the moment I cannot get an answer from any magazine, or ABC, to discover at which end the problems have occurred in the past, and in the case of ABC no answer has been forthcoming about why it has taken a decade to split print and digital into a more easily understandable format.
Below I have added a screenshot of the data from ABC from 2000 to 2023 for Autosport, Motor Sport, F1/GP Racing and Motorsport News.
Back in 2018 I interviewed for a position at Motor Sport Magazine. A five-hour drive South, parking in a Sainsbury’s car park around the corner (five quid to park!! And the donuts were 60p more expensive!!) a forty-minute interview - not even polite enough to ask about the drive down - then the same drive home (the five quid parking if I remember was because the first hour was free, and I was parked for 61 minutes.) I didn’t get the job.
I really did still believe at that point that the only way to ‘succeed’ would be to move to London and force myself into one of the ‘Big Mags.’ That I didn’t get an offer was for the best (I was offered other jobs with other outlets later.) Had I switched my current home, with beautiful vistas of the Northeast coast, for the big smoke, we’d have been living in a box as a family. At the time quality of life was 90% of the reason why I wouldn’t take those other offers, 10% was that I knew that print would become unsustainable, and to be fair, I imagine my usual loud, bludgeon like deliverance, and use of words that would fuck off Toto Wolf and his mate MBS would have had me out the door fairly quickly anyway!
I do like the idea of Autosport as a monthly, but I do wonder. Those quips about it not selling without F1 on the cover, will that make it F1 centric? Will there be room for both Autosport and GP Racing from the same stable if that is the case? Will Autosport as a monthly match GP Racing sales wise? Will they merge? Will the whole project fail?
Here’s a couple of numbers
In 2023 the ‘big three’ publications sold 693,178 issues in print collectively, in 2000 it was a total of 4,694,271.
In 2000 Autosport sold 61,025 copies per week, in 2023 (combined) that dropped to 7,828.
Arguments persist about quality. In my research (due to be published in 2026/27) I have coded language and style comparing magazines from the past 30 years. This is not a place to reveal the preliminary results, nor the techniques used, but by those metrics the content has not changed much. Reading habits however have shifted immensely.
Over the last nine years in study and research when it comes to magazines and online, there is data driven information that shows that the print industry is not collapsing at the rate it seems. There is a shift to niche and micro-niche publishing. I have been there myself with Motor Racing UK/Touring Car Magazine. Some months in print you’ll sell 300 copies, others it’s 3,000 (using the Autosport/F1 cover example, that’s why Motor Racing UK became a Touring Car publication
Online, an early Sports Journalism lecture for new students will instil this:
No article should be over 300 words. No paragraph should top 30 words, or two lines. That is a damaging rule of thumb, but it is based on metrics. The inverse triangle of information is also pushed – get the meat into those 300 words, because beyond that, people have checked out – and that has had a greater impact on magazine writing than any other factor.