Are Performance-Boat Magazines Dead?
The economy has wreaked havoc on the go-fast titles. The question is: Will they rebound?
March 20, 2011
A little more than three years ago, Powerboat magazine—a title I’ve written for since 1995—was 160 pages from cover to cover. The most recent issue is 80 pages. The issue before that was 78 pages. Three years ago, the magazine published 11 times a year. Now it’s down to six.
Any way you look at it, that’s a dramatic decline, especially for the longest- and best-established magazine—we’re talking 35 years of continuous publishing—covering the high-performance boat market.
So what happened?
Powerboat magazine is one of three established titles remaining in the performance-boat market.
The simple answer reminds me of an article I read 20-something years ago in the Atlantic Monthly titled, “It’s The Economy, Stupid.” But to elaborate further, go-fast performance-boat demand plummeted three years ago with the deaths of easy consumer financing—spurred by the sub-prime housing loan disaster—and dealer floor-plan financing. Compounding the problem was a glut of new and used inventory thanks to repossessions and dealership closures.
That spelled disaster for the biggest production builders in the game, namely Baja, Fountain and Donzi. As it happens, those builders were among Powerboat’s biggest advertisers.
So print advertising went south with boat sales. Though not hit quite as hard as the production side, custom builders felt the pinch as well and responded accordingly by reducing and even canceling their advertising schedules.
The total number of pages in any given magazine is determined by the number of advertising pages in that issue. When ad pages decline, magazines contract. And that, my friends, is how a 160-page magazine becomes a 70-page magazine—and how the number of annual issues drops from eleven to six—in just three years. Mystery solved.
Here’s the kicker: Powerboat magazine has weathered the economic storm better than a slew of its former competitors. Hot Boat, Extreme Boats, Speedboat and H20 Full Throttle? All gone.
At present, there are three viable titles left in the go-fast magazine niche: Powerboat, Performance Boats and Poker Runs America. All have their supporters and detractors and, from where I sit, all have something to offer. Of course, all are thinner than they once were. (I don’t include the new Sport Boat title in this group because at present only one issue has been published.)
But will all three survive? They will, and that’s not just wishful thinking from someone who gets paid to write for one of them.
Certainly, the Internet presents formidable competition for print media of all kinds, just as television presented competition for radio when it first arrived. But as niche publications, Powerboat, Performance Boats and Poker Runs America have an advantage over general interest magazines and newspapers. Their readers are endlessly passionate about the niche. They can’t get enough of it.
That said, the performance-boat market is a long way from anything resembling a comeback, particularly in the mostly decimated West Coast custom realm. Expect to see a few more companies fail.
All three magazines will have to watch their pennies, and I don’t just mean until the market returns to its prior peak levels. The market will never return to those levels, at least according to every performance-boat builder I’ve spoken with in the last three years. The go-fast boat world has changed forever.
As have the magazines that cover it. They are, after all, a reflection of their niche. And as long as the niche survives, so, too, will the magazines that follow it.
Bi-weekly columnist Matt Trulio is the editor at large for Powerboat magazine. He has written for the magazine since 1994. Trulio’s daily blog can be found on speedonthewater.com, a site he created and maintains, which is the high-performance arm of the BoaterMouth group.
