admin @ Sun, 2006-09-03 11:00
LOS ANGELES - Hot Import Nights has a pretty simple recipe to attract 18- to 30-year-old males to its car shows: Mix in hundreds of souped-up cars, spice with scantily clad models and toss it all together with thumping music.
Now, the company behind the 10-year-old event has taken its mixture of sex appeal and car culture online, launching one of the latest niche sites to seek its part of the ever-expanding social networking universe.
The car show's formula apparently works: About 20,000 primarily young men recently paid $30 to attend a Hot Import Night at the Los Angeles Convention Center, one of about 20 events the organizers hold around the country each year. Meanwhile, the 6-month-old HINcity.com receives more than 4 million page views per month and has attracted 65,000 people to create profiles, said its Irvine, Calif.-based parent company Action Media Holdings.
Glenn Rogers, CEO of Action Media, said the shows rely on word-of-mouth and online marketing, but few mainstream promotions such as newspaper advertisements.
Hot Import Nights was founded about 10 years ago in Long Beach and has enjoyed steady growth as people's imaginations have been captured by the souped-up import cars in movies such as 2001's “The Fast and the Furious” and more recently the “Need for Speed” video games by Electronic Arts, said Mike Munar, one of the event's co-founders.
Now Action Media wants to steer its audience onto HINcity.com, where people can post ads for cars and auto parts, brag over uploaded photos of their latest garage projects and gawk at pictures of scantily clad models. It's among the latest niche social networking sites inspired by the runaway success of MySpace.com, which boasts more than 100 million members.
“It's really the MySpace for our space,” Rogers said. Other online communities for car enthusiasts include the more straight-laced www.carspace.com .
David Medve, 22, of Mission Viejo, is a mechanic who said his job is to “make cars faster.” He admired the fabrication on a tricked out four-door with a jagged hood that opened from the center and said he saw Subarus and Hondas with advanced engine modifications.
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