"The Best Car Reviews Money Can Buy": The Wall St. Journal Exposes the Car Magazine Review Scam

By Marc J. Rauch
Exec. Vice President/Co-Publisher
THE AUTO CHANNEL

Originally published May 5, 2010

For years, auto journalists and industry insiders have known or suspected that car magazine endorsements and Car-of-the-Year type awards” were often bestowed based upon the amount of advertising that a carmaker bought in a particular publication. Today, May 10th, the Wall Street Journal published an expose of how Consumers Digest, a monthly print magazine and website, has operated their particular pay-to-play scheme.

According to the WSJ story, car manufacturers pay up to $35,000 per vehicle for the right to use and quote a positive Consumers Digest car review. In particular, the story cites a sales-hungry General Motors as recently paying Consumers Digest as much as $335,000 to cover 15 different 2010 models. Nissan, KIA and Ford are other car makers who have “licensed” use of the endorsements. Chrysler is currently negotiating their license fee.

The Wall Street Journal says that such payments are one of Consumers Digest’s primary revenue streams.

Consumers Digest’s Editor, Rich Dzierwa, said the fees don’t influence its picks, and each winner is described in its magazine. However, WSJ points out that the website only publishes the reviews of those manufacturers who have paid the fee. The reviews are written by free-lance writers. Consumers Digest’s editors and publisher then decides on the winners.

Dzierwa also said that “There is no pressure on the editorial staff to consider products, to consider vehicles because either they have been licensees or because there is a possibility that they will be.”

So I’ll let you do the math: Consumers Digest has, let’s say, 10 journalists submitting reviews to them. The publisher and editor knows that they can get car makers to pay a lot of money for a good review (obviously they are not going to pay for a bad review), so do they accept positive reviews from their writers or negative reviews? Then, based upon past experience, they know which manufacturers are likely to want to license these reviews and awards. So would you go with reviews and awards to car makers that tell you to go the hell when you try to scam them, or would you use reviews and bestow awards to those who provide your primary revenue? Hmmm.

J.D. Power & Associates, while not a print publisher (although they are a web publisher among other things), sells results of their surveys to car makers and charges licensing fees for the use of those results in promotional campaigns. J.D. Power’s fees run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

By the way, The Auto Channel has never asked for or accepted money from a car maker for the use of its text or video reviews, and has never charged for the use of our sound-bite quotes. In addition, in the years that The Auto Channel has bestowed car-of-the-year awards, not only did we not charge any kind of use-fee for the notoriety, we have never asked the manufacturers to pay for the trophies.

In addition, because of our policy of providing all of our content for free to all visitors to TheAutoChannel.com, most all automotive websites don't charge for access to their content (they tried, but couldn't overcome us).

For honest positive and negative reviews from real professionals see The Auto Channel's Reviews.