Motor Trend Turns Its ‘Roadkill’ Web Series Into A Magazine

A magazine that has built up a library of successful videos on YouTube is now incorporating those videos back into its print business. Motor Trend, which runs a YouTube channel that claims more than 3.3 million subscribers and upwards of 880 million views, will develop a quarterly magazine based off Roadkill, one of its most popular web series.

Roadkill stars a pair of car enthusiasts, David Freiburger and Mike Finnegan, as they engage in ridiculous automotive shenanigans. Freiburger and Finnegan’s adventures show off everything from classic hot rods to broken down jalopies to top-of-the-line luxury cars. Scott Dickey, the CEO of Motor Trend publisher Ten: The Enthusiast Network, described the series to The Wall Street Journal as “guys behaving badly with cars.” Commenters on Roadkill’s YouTube videos have alternatively termed it “Top Gear America done right.”

The Roadkill magazine will share the web

series’ young, fresh attitude, and the hope is that Millennial consumers will be willing to pay $9.99 per issue to pick it up. “We don’t think print is a dying business,” Dickey told WSJ. “We do make a bunch of money in print. And with millennials, they’re not opposed to print. They just didn’t grow up with it.”

Dickey isn’t the first person attempting to translate YouTube success into a magazine format. Comedy duo Smosh, for example, has starred within the pages of a publication that carries their brand. More recently, a British offering called Oh My Vlog has featured top YouTube celebrities in print.

Motor Trend, of course, can bring its established knowledge of the magazine business to the Roadkill periodical. The new quarterly’s first issue will arrive in September; until then, updates and online features are available on a recently-launched Roadkill website.