As their website says, The Winding Road is a monthly manifesto for the driving obsessed. It’s a free digital magazine. The content is excellent and their traffic substantial. Who needs to buy a car magazine if you can get more upto date and passionate content online. Their explanation of why it’s free is excellent (the highlighting below is mine):
The digital edition of Winding Road is free for several reasons. Primary among these is that it just plain costs substantially less to produce a digital magazine than it does a conventional print magazine. Second, as a free publication we can build up a group of loyal and devoted readers faster than we can if we charge for the magazine. This in turn allows us to attract advertisers who are ever so desirous of tempting our loyal and devoted readers with their products.
Those same advertisers are the reason there isn’t a catch. As with print magazines, advertisers are a main source of income. Provided that we do our part in attracting advertisers to Winding Road, the magazine should continue to be free in the long run. That’s why we offer you a three-year free subscription, not the ever-popular one- or two-issue “trial offer.”
The Winding Road is the kind of new media disruption magazine publishers, distributors and newsagents need to study and understand. It has a passion which resonates with
Josh Gordon, writing at Folio magazine says that The Winding Road gets over 180,000 unique readers viewing an average of 22 pages every month.
Car magazines are important to newsagents, they account for a high proportion of browsers. I’d hate to seem them stop visiting and get their pleasure online.