This magazine should be called Ad Street, not Super Street.
Written: Jun 24 '05
Product Rating:
Pros: Very few anymore. Maybe Back In The Day. Maybe
Cons: Almost the entire magazine is a Con, read the full review to understand why.
The Bottom Line: Do not purchase this magazine in anyway until they fix it and make it as good as it once was. They used to be the best, now they just suck.
reptilesblade's Full Review: Super Street Magazine
This is a letter I have sent to Nads, the editor of Super Street on June 23rd of 2005. It informs him that he has lost a long-standing consumer of his magazine and exactly why it happened. If you are considering getting a subscription to Super Street this is probably something you need to read.
This is a direct copy of what they got.
Important letter from a long time Super Street fan.
Hello Nads!
You do not know me but I know a little bit about you. I have been a loyal subscriber of your magazine (Super Street) for roughly two years now, and for nearly a year before that I bought it every month off of the shelf. You have definitely been one of, if not my most favorite magazines over the years. As much as I have enjoyed your magazine over the years I am writing to inform you that I have just canceled my subscription. I have done this regretfully after a great deal of thinking about it. There are several reasons I have done this. I would like to give them to you so you might have a chance to improve your magazine and possibly win me back as a subscriber and anyone like myself who might have left or are leaving for the same reasons.
1. Your content.
You no longer cover cars that the average person can afford. Almost every article you do now is about some $100,000+ car that is usually a professional racecar of one type or another. Hell I do not even remember you reviewing any new cars except for the Acura RSX. It seems as if you now frown on what your readers are likely to own and drive. Your tag line in the July 05 issue for the Reader Rides section of your magazine sums up your new attitude towards such vehicles easily. It reads “Readers Rides: Almost A Feature.” That line alone would never have appeared in your magazine even a year ago. You have always adamantly claimed that it is the people that make up this movement and your subscription base that makes it better than any other automotive subculture out there, however as of late the only people you really seem to be concerned with representing are the advertisers and their professional racing teams.
I was overjoyed when you first started the Back In The Day articles and I cannot describe my disappointment with it over time when I realized that at least half of the cars shown were the AE86 Toyota Corolla. Sure there have been a few other cars represented but the vast majority of the articles have only been about one model of car. The AE86 was and still is a great car, but there are other cars out there, both old and new, that are just as capable if not more so. What about the Honda Prelude, Accord, Celica, Supra, Miata, Datsun, MR2, and Honda 600 just to name very few? Please do not tell me you could not find great representations of these vehicles.
Go here to find some really awesome third generation Accords, weather you believe they exist or not.
http://www.3geez.com/
http://www.3geez.com/forumdisplay.php?f=38
Tell them Reptile sent you.
I am sorry to say that the last truly enjoyable article I read in your magazine was the one where the Japanese racer won a race with a car that had half of the power of all of his opponents. I am sad to say that was at least a year ago.
Another thing that bothers me is that you seem to have this strange misconception that it is your place to review movies, video games, and music for us. You are a car magazine, since when does that qualify you to review and rate these other products that have very little if anything to do with what you are supposed to be covering? I understand Gran Turismo 4 and will give you that one, but the rest is just an unnecessary waste of your time and energy that could be spent better trying to make the magazine better overall.
I know many people have been complaining for a long time that your tech articles and your parts reviews are disappointing to say the least. Instead of trying to fix this problem you have done the complete opposite and instead focused on products that have very little if anything to do with what you do.
Do you not realize that your reviews for a video game carry the same amount of weight as Maxim’s reviews?
2. The Ads.
Look, I am not going to beat you over the head with this one. I am a businessman myself, I can see the business side of your magazine and I understand you need at least some advertising dollars to continue to keep doing what you do. I have no problem with some ads, however since you redesigned your magazine late last year the number of ads went from slightly annoying to unacceptable. I will use your July 05 issue once again to illustrate my point. Just to get to the table of contents you have to go through not three, not four, and not even five advertisements but TEN! These are not one-page ads either; these are full two page ads. The first twenty pages of your magazine is nothing but advertisements! Then when you finally get to the table of contents on the page across from it is yet another advertisement. Turn the page to get to the rest of your table of contents and across from it once again is another advertisement. Then turn the page once again and you will be reading Holeshot with yet another single page advertisement across from it. You then have to pass up another full two-page ad and another single page one to get to the next editorial called The Wong Way. The Wong Way shares one third of its page with an ad as well. Turn the page over to page thirty and you are confronted with another full-page advertisement across from the Chu’s Or Lose editorial, which also shares one third of its page with another advertisement.
I think I will stop there, I feel I have proved my point that there are just entirely too many advertisements in your magazine. In the first thirty-one pages of your magazine nearly all of them were either an advertisement or shared space with one. I remember sometime during the last quarter of 2004 that you increased the size of your magazine, unfortunately the only thing you increased it with was advertisements and not any kind of real content.
Again I realize that you depend upon the revenue you get from these ads in order to remain financially solvent, but the magazine was a great one for many years before you ceased to be Super Street and instead became Ad Street. If I wanted a magazine full of nothing but useless advertisements I would get a subscription to Home Business Magazine.
3. Additional comments.
The only thing I can say is that the current Super Street is not the one I fell in love with so long ago. Even the articles and editorials seem to have a decreasing quality level since November of 2004. It is not even a definite “this is worse than it was” kind of thing, the magazine just somehow does not seem as good as it once was on a more general note.
I stayed unhappy with your magazine since at least November of 2004 before I finally called in and canceled my subscription earlier today on June 23rd. Even before November 2004 your magazine seemed as if it was going downhill but it was still good enough to warrant my subscription price of roughly $24 a year. I have been waiting month after month for you to turn back into the great magazine you once were but I finally decided I could wait no longer. The only reason I renewed my subscription at all was at the time I was waiting for the special April issue. The April issue has always been one of your best and it has never let me down. After I renewed my subscription I realized that I had already received the April issue of your magazine. It was completely indistinguishable from the rest of your recent issues, that is to say it sucked just as much as all of them have since about November of 2004.
Even then I still gave you one chance after another, waiting to see if your next issue would be any better. I am now holding the July 2005 issue and have finally realized that the improvements I have desperately hoped you would implement will not be arriving any time soon despite the fact that I know you have received messages similar in content to this one since the redesign of the magazine. I know this because you even published a few in the Loud & Clear section (which now only takes up one and a half ad choked pages followed by several more ads) of your magazine in some of the issues after the redesign. I know I am not alone in my sentiments and instead of making me feel better it really only makes me feel worse. All I have seen you do since the redesign is try and defend your ad-choked magazine and have done nothing short of attack those who try and point out its many critical flaws. To my knowledge you have never once even tried to recognize that the redesign in general was a bad thing, if for no other reason than you attempted to fix something that was not really broken.
I am sorry that it finally came to this and that I had to use so many harsh words against something I once cared so much for. Thank you for all the enjoyment you have given my friends and me over the years, but until you fix the many problems with Super Street I will no longer want to be a part of something that does not represent my interest. Just so you know, you have been replaced by Forbes.
Recommended:
No
Primary Reason for Buying: Articles Recommended For: Hobbyists/Enthusiasts
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