News and views on motorsports

Sunday, June 13, 2004

End of an Era

I've been reading Autosport almost as long as I've followed motor racing. That is to say a long time. It's becoming a habit to browse their headlines first before any other activity when I'm on the net.

Alas, this is all coming to a sad ending. They are going the way of my other favourite F1 site, Atlas F1, by going to a subscription only model. This truly sucks. Perhaps, magazine subscriptions have decreased or perhaps they're just being greedy but surely, they can make the news free. Lots of other websites still do it. I don't understand why they need to make us pay for the news.

All in all, I absolutely refuse to pay to read F1 news, so unfortunately I will no longer be recommending Autosport as an excellent source of F1 news. I guess I will be frequenting F1Racing.net more often from now on. And it's time to trove other news sources as well.

Its really very sad. I was going to subscribe to Autosport online anyways to read their technical articles but now, forget it. Well, I'm sure Autosport are driving away thousands of people from their website with the latest move. I guess they still have old school mentalities over there.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm going to be making my karting site subscription, but I'll be keeping the news and anything from a press release free.

However, I do think longer articles, track tests and on-location updates need to be paid for somehow, and advertising seems to have a pernicious influence on my l'il corner of motorsport.

Thanks for the link btw, I'll undderstand if you take it down when I go subscription but I hope you don't!