Photography Credit: David S. Wallens
As we all know, prices have gone crazy. It’s certainly not the time to buy a house or a car.
Still, life goes on, and sometimes you must stick your neck out and make a major purchase. Personally, I’m thrilled to see Chris Tropea, who runs our video department, buy his first home–and perhaps more importantly, now have a decent garage.
We were recently unlucky enough to need a new refrigerator here at the Suddard household. Refrigerators now cost what I used to pay for a decent project car.
You probably aren’t focusing much on how our expenses have gone up. You probably enjoy our publication as an escape from the reality of rising prices, politics and trouble abroad.
But I need to think about expenses here at the company, too.
Despite coming back stronger after the pandemic, with ad revenue growing and circulation at an all-time high, the company’s costs have gone up even more. Postage keeps rising, and shipping magazines to newsstands has gone nuts. And not only has paper gotten more expensive, but we’ve delt with flat-out shortages as well.
Then there are healthcare costs. Double-digit increases have been the norm for decades, yet we continue to provide insurance to all of our employees and their families at no cost.
At some point, we realized, we needed to look at what we charge for this product. And rather than slipping in a rate increase, I wanted to be transparent.
When we started publishing this magazine back in 1984, we charged $14.99 for a year. Then, more than 30 years ago, we had to increase the subscription price to $19.99.
And it’s been there ever since, even though that $19.99 is now worth about $40.00 in today’s money.
Despite fierce competition from other niche publications as well as some larger, mainstream pubs, we ate the increased costs or put the burden on advertisers. We simply didn’t feel that we could increase our subscription price.
In a fight to maintain their rate base–that’s the number of subscribers that publishers can market to advertisers–many buff books have implemented deeply discounted subscription prices. (Most learned, eventually, that that’s not a sustainable strategy and have either ceased publishing altogether or taken their products online.)
As for niche publications, few are left, and the ones that have survived do a great job covering their segments and, more importantly, have genuine interaction and camaraderie with the markets they serve.
Those survivors also charge what is needed to serve that market–often $40 to $80 per year–while still turning a reasonable profit. That allows them to invest in equipment and take care of their people.
Thankfully, we have a robust advertiser base that believes in both us and you, our readers. I recently had to sit down with Tire Rack, our biggest partner, and explain to Matt Edmonds, its senior marketing person, that if we didn’t raise prices, we weren’t going to remain profitable. And at this stage in my life, I wasn’t willing to see this company fail to make it to the next generation. I admit, it was a scary day.
I was pleasantly surprised when he looked at me and said something to the effect of, “You’re a valuable partner, and I appreciate what you’ve done for Tire Rack and for the sport as a whole.”
Perhaps this wasn’t going to be as tough as I thought. From there, we went through our advertising roster and found almost zero resistance. Several others said we weren’t charging enough for the work we do. They encouraged us to do what was necessary to keep publishing.
This certainly helped us get back to an even keel. Still, with the costs we were facing, we needed to bite the bullet, reach out to our readers and ask the scary question: Do you care enough about what we do to pay another $10 per year for it? Is it worth another $1.25 per issue?
If the answer is yes, then we’ll continue putting out our technical content. We’ll go ahead and hire as needed. We’ll continue to seek that next project car.
As the old saying goes, we vote with our wallets. If you like receiving a print magazine, you now have the power to keep it in your life.
Let me know what you think about all this. As many of you now know, I do take the time to answer every letter I get.
As a longtime member of this family, short answer: YES! I'll gladly pay another $10/year for the best car mag on the market. I also take Classic Motorsports (of course) ,Racer, Hagerty, Hemmings Classic, and Old Cars, (and more than a dozen non-car magazines) all of which have higher subscription rates. I prefer a hard copy of magazines in general.
The prudent thing for me to do would be to re-up now, before the price increase. lol
another YES here. if every magazine on the planet went up by $10/yr, it would only cost me $10. :-)
Absolutely yes.
That's not too much of an increase. I'm doing my part with a digital-only GRM+ subscription, with PDF downloads it's just way more convenient for me, also more eco-friendly 
Yes and no.
I have dropped most of the magazines I used to subscribe to (down to a couple from a dozen or more) in favour of subscribing to the internet editions, which is much less expensive and which I can archive on my computer instead of in endless boxes of old print issues.
On some magazines (high end audio for instance) I have narrowed my focus over the years and the areas I am interested in (music) are greatly outnumbered in terms of volume by material I don't care about at all any more (equipment reviews). I'd have dropped them completely without the internet option to continue as a subscriber.
I still buy both your magazines at the local store when I want them, but should get around to signing up for your net based versions.
Have you guys done a projection of how many subscribers you'd lose if you went internet only versus the saving in print costs?
As someone who may have forgotten about their subscription charge what you need to in order to make a fair profit and continue to treat your employees and subscribers well. There's honestly no difference to a $20 and $80 annual drop in my "fun car stuff" ocean
That said please cover more about what makes you guys unique... More challenge coverage/FEATURES!!!!. More UTCC coverage/features. Cover the higher level hillclimb/time trial events as well as SportsCar does for autox. There are absolutely fascinating cars being built for these events usually with good stories attached.
Thanks for the support you guys. We appreciate it.
Y'all would seriously freak out if you Saw the kind of paper price increases we've been dealing with the last couple years. The paper market is unbelievably volatile. Trees take a long time to grow, production is complex, the final product is heavy and bulky and spoils easily in shipping and storage, and there are countless variations and standards around the world that conspire to make it one of the trickiest commodities to manage at scale. It used to be that "good news" from our paper suppliers was paper NOT increasing in price or (gasp) even going down. But now, that good news is confined to a slowing of the rate of acceleration of the near constant increase. Seriously at some point it's just going to be easier to hire people to call you and describe each page to you on the phone.
Anyway, enough complaining. We're all eternally grateful that we're able to still make this product. And I'm also thankful for those of you that have found alternative methods to the physical printed edition to do your part to conserve resources. I'll always appreciate the physical printed format as well, but I'm really glad we have multiple avenues of distribution that are available fo those that want optional methods. That's the kind of thing that I think will ensure that ALL of the methods—and probably some we haven't even foreseen yet—will be around for a long time.
I was just thinking this past weekend what it must be like to run the GRM business. More specifically, I was wondering if/when Hagerty, who seems to be in a bit of an acquisition mode, would come knocking and try to buy the business.
However, all of my curiosity aside, I'm more than happy to pay an increased subscription rate if it means that the people who put their hard work into the content I enjoy so much are able to make a decent living.
I can't speak for everyone here at GRM headquarters, but it's been a really pleasant surprise thus far how many of you, our readers, are accepting of a price increase. The positive reactions so far are outweighing the few negative reactions we've received.
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