MBM / MBY Overlap

martynwhiteley

martynwhiteley

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Redscouser's recent post got me thinking about where MBM and MBY sit in the marketplace.

Apologies if it's been discussed before, and I do remember some forum criticism of duplicate tests of new boats in the sister mags, but I think it deserves another airing.

I subscribe to MBM but buy MBY inevitabley every month, and there does seem to be an increasing overlap, as if they were in competition.

If MBY concentrates on the 'new' end of the market, at say plus £100K, why couldn't MBM devote more space to used cruisers and their maintenance/refurbishment?

What is it that drives the content? Reader Surveys?, Sales Studies?, The tendancy for any journalist to want to cover the more glamarous articles?, Advertisers pressure/revenue?

Narrowboats, and Sailing thingies seem to be covered fairly well at the low budget/maintenance end of the market, but why not cruisers/sportsboats?

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I could'nt agree more with Marty on this subject.

The number of people who own motor boats and cruisers under £10,000 must number in the thousands,surely there is an editor out there who must see the potential of a magazine to accomodate us working class boaters.

I am sure with a magazine like this covering all aspects of doing up an old boat or keeping an old boat up to scratch it would sell like hot cakes.
I am also sure that the chandlers and parts manufacturers would advertise as they would make more money out of the diy boater than the new boats.

I get a bit fed up with paying £4 for a magazine which covers £50,000 boats/selling boats that we can never afford and is full of everything except the motor boats and cruisers which can be seen on all waterways in Great Britain.

I say to all the EDITORS "WAKE UP" you have an untapped market out here waiting to subscribe to that kind of magazine.

I would like to hear what other boaters like myself think on this subject?, am I in the minority or ????.
So come voice your views, you never know someone MIGHT hear us?.

Heres hoping that someone, somewhere, sometime, will take notice of thousands of average boaters.

Ric

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I feel that MBM and MBY are quite different.
I am a retired person who has been boating for years and having been through three boats from £5,000 to £40,000 - finally managed to save (maturing endowment insurances etc) to buy the boat of my dreams and I now have the time to enjoy boating to the full.
I also enjoy MBM but find that MBY does not suit my working class roots for some reason. I would therefore suggest that instead of changing the existing structure of the two mags, an "extra" is tried initially as a "sunday paper magazine section" to the two mags concerning the subjects, prices, and areas you have highlighted. Feedback would then show if there were enough support for another small boat, river boat or starter boat magazine. From what I read on this forum the resulting publication should do quite well.

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Do what I did, stop buying them. The info that you require is available in abundance on the web for free.
The only mag I buy every now and then is BoatMart. But even that gets a bit "flicky" rather than a informative read. What is it you want out of your mag. A manual on looking after or restoring your boat in monthly installments or a publication that brings you news and reviews in the boating world?

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Like many users on this forum I suspect, I'd struggle to OD on boating literature, and compared with the cost of keeping a boat afloat, £10 or so a month on mags is peanuts, so I'll buy them regardless.

The good thing I find about boat magazines is their suitablitity for the 'Loobrary'.

They do have a certain 'timeless' quality that escapes many other genre. Let's face it, picking up a 30 month old PCPlus is not going to entertain you too much during your IBS therapy session (BTW - What's the difference between IDS and IBS ? - One's a constipated pain in the butt, and the other's a medical complaint!), however a 2 1/2 year old MBM can be worth revisiting on many occassions.

But it doesn't mean that things can't be improved, and what we want to see, refurbishment articles, second hand boat tests etc., are not as available on the web, as what they do contain now, e.g. new boat specs, photo's, new gear, etc.

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I don't disagree but there are some economics. The publisher receives about 60% of the cover price from mag sales. The rest is spent on distribution. It costs a fortune to truck magazines to every newsagent in the country, then to refund the unsold copies, sort out the pulping, etc etc. So magazine sales are only part of the publisher's income. The rest is advertising.

The publisher therefore has to print a mag that advetisers want to buy space in, or charge a bigger cover price. Now, the market probably wont stand a £5 cover price, so advertisers have to be attracted. tis as simple as that.

BTW I'm not saying that editorial views are infuenced by advertiser wishes, just that the mag as a whole and its readership need to be what advertisers want to buy.

Hence, we have 2 mags that aim at boating well above £10k, and several sailing mags that are the same (with borderline exception of PBO), and that's how the market works. Anyone is free to set up a magazine with different focus, but they dont because it wont make money
 
But why are there no full page chandlery/nav electronics shop adverts in MBM, but PBO and BoatMart have them aplenty?

Seems to me that all the major boat builders are having to pay twice to put the same ad in both mags, (or is it a bogof deal?)

I suspect the advertising mix has been an evolution, and if MBM became more practical, then the appropriate advertisers would follow.

But we don't need mega changes, just a few less £275K new boat tests in MBM, being replaced with a test of a £50K Princess 37, £70K Broom 37, £15K Princess 32, £60K Birchwood TS31, £12K Fairline Holiday etc. And I mean TESTS, not half page summaries.

Plus at least one article a month on a refurbishment project.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be without my monthy MBM, but I do believe that MBM and MBY are pitched a bit too close in the market. I but MBY to dream, but like many, still find a lot to dream about in MBM. Perhaps if MBY was not available or I never looked at it, then I would think MBM was perfection, because it covers all angles.

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'Motor Boats Monthly'

(See Magazine Indexes at the top of page)

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Fully agree with your comments on loo reading I always have a few of both in there and yes you can still finds new bits to read in an older edition. Sad really but thats life.

I used to think it a bit irrelevant for them to do tests on £1m plus boats and put up a thread accordingley. But as someone said the car mags always have large expensive german cars on the front on test to help sell the mag, as well as more affordable stuff inside.

Suppose its still fun to read and dream

<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.suncoastmarine.co.uk>Sun Coast Sea School & Charter</A>
 
I Totally agree with you.

I hope they rethink the focus soon as its approaching London Boat Show which is re-subscribe time for a lot of people.

I have already cancelled MBY and dont feel all that inclined to renew MBM at the moment.



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MBY does a great job at its end of the market, and I do buy it occasionally when I want to dream of boats I'll never own. The rest of the time I buy MBM, basically because there's nothing else. MBM, in trying to be all things to all boaters and is doomed to fail. It might please the advertisers for MBM to be a MBY clone, with a few stale crusts thrown in to keep the owners of affordable boats quiet, but MBM is failing a large slice of it's readership by adopting this approach. It would appear that I'm not the only "budget boater" who is getting fed up of seeing £200K boat reviews where we'd rather see some practical tips, or articles on someone else's restoration or self-build project to help keep our spirits up as we slave away on our own boats. I keep giving MBM another chance but it can't go on indefinitely. Wake up MBM or lose me as a reader!

Bill.

<hr width=100% size=1>One of these days I'll have a boat that WORKS
 
Hi

I read both magazines MBM and MBY and although obviously there is some cross over, lets face it the boat business and as a hobby, in comparison to a lot of past times, is tiny! ( I think MBY has a circulation of about 20,000 and MBM 16,000) hence I think that there is bound to be similarities on the coverage of boats etc. I haven't read PBO a great deal but that seems to cover more live aboards, refurbishments etc ( first impression was that anyway).

jfm-Lets be honest yes the publisher does have to account for unsold copies but after a while they get to know the market they are selling into and so the amount returned becomes minimal.

It is the advertising that I think covers the costs of these magazines and make them viable, lets face it 20,000 x £4 isnt going to do much! The advertising is hugely expensive in these magazines considering the circulation, but being glossy boat magazines thats probably to be expected
(I do know the exact amounts for both MBM and MBY but wouldnt reveal them on an open forum thats between the magazine and its advertisers, although Im sure many know already)

I think in boats as in any luxury market company egos and profiles are much to blame as should Fairline do a huge 2 page spread Sunseeker will want to etc etc. and so demand for advertising increases as does the price, it becomes upmanship as opposed to accountable advertising ( do these manufacturers really need to spend the amount they do? people know their brands, very few new boats that need anouncing are ever brought out, it would save something on the high prices of boats, and from what I gather people even more so than with cars, stick to the make they find and like)

And I would definitly say in my experience and my opinion that articles in the magazines are definitly influenced by who and how much a particular company particpitates in taking advertising space, knowing numerous companies that operate in the UK boating business both manufacturing and distributing.

Again I stress that this is my opinion based on my experiences and in no way is it an alligation as to the working practices of any magazine.

The magazines seem to me to follow the norm' in respect that even before reading a test just knowing the make on test you know often how its going to end, that I find very dissapointing, yet testing would be a subjective issue so thats to be expected, but I do feel that one manufacturer lets say an american one ( usually) can leave bare wires running through a cupboard and a huge deal is made of it yet lets say a UK established brand can do the same and its not worthy of note, very dissapointing, yet exactly what you see in car magazines also- hence I would never make a decision based on any magazine test.

What started as a response ended as a rant so I apologise but would say that on the whole MBM and MBY to me are both excellent reads and as one person has stated you can go back to them over and over again reading still relevent info.

Sorry for ranting

Kevin



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It is impossible to please all of the people all of the time. Maybe if we were all to fill in the reader surveys they would get a better idea as to what the punter wants. If you dont fill in the survey then dont moan thats what they are there to do.

<hr width=100% size=1>Dom

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.soltron.co.uk>the website</A>
 
Actually I am not and I dont vote. Am thinking of doing it tho but who do I vote for?

<hr width=100% size=1>Dom

<A target="_blank" HREF=http://www.soltron.co.uk>the website</A>
 
Oh Dom Dom Dom!

My father's generation died fighting for democracy and the right to vote. Everyone, whether in Guernsey, Jersey or the UK should turn up at the Poling Station and use their vote or it makes all those deaths worthless. If you feel that the candidates do not deserve your vote then by all means write in capitals "You are all a load of ********"" But for Gods sake register your vote!!
(Sorry folks if this is a little insular to Guerns but I feel a little strongly over this matter)

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Hmmmm...

I was going to stay out of this but couldn't resist.

Once upon a time I worked for a magazine called Practical Motor Cruiser. Even in the 1980s it pitched its editorial coverage well below the glitz with down-to-earth articles about ordinary people doing their boating in modest boats. We once sold a series of advertisements to one of the big players, but only because MBY had hacked off the boss of that company at the time. Other that that we rarely saw full page ads appear, let alone colour ones.

Vetus was a big advertiser for us, taking every outside back cover, but no chandler wanted to know, despite our practical profile. The bonus was our ed to ad ratio was fantastic!

Really sad thing though was that the readers weren't exactly flooding through in droves. The owner of the mag claimed we sold 6,000 a month but I never saw the figures and suspect it might not have been that good. So hitting the sub-£10,000 bracket is not necessarily a golden route to major copy sales in my experience...in fact if I had not jumped ship to join the MBM start-up team in 1987 I would have been out of a job soon afterwards.

When we started MBM it always had a broader coverage compared to PMC because it needed to, frankly, given the small size of the audience. MBM survived a very nasty recession in the early 1990s and is currently seeing its circulation move in the right direction. Not a smug comment...we'd like more readers for all of the titles here as you'd expect...but some of us have been teetering along a careful balancing act of readers' interests for a long time now and it is not as easy as one might expect.

Current editorial policies on both motorboat titles not in my hands, so in terms of some of the comments here I'll leave Tom and Hugo to read and respond if they feel its right to do so but as with all of these threads there are some asumptions made that are not accurate. For example, JFM's view of the wastage on mags (if you want to ensure maximum possible distribution) is far more accurate than the comment that followed from Kevin where he asserts that returns are 'minimal'.

As for more 'practical' ads, the really sad thing for you motorboaters out there is that many chandlers don't consider you practical in nature...you apparently employ the maritime equivalent of Jeeves to do all of your work for you. Yes, I know, it's rubbish, but that has been the attitude of many chandlers for a long time now, whatever the value of your motorboat. Hence the lack of advertising (and no before you say it they make their judgements on perceived spend in shops and through online/mail order, not according to types of editorial coverage).

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