Consumer Reports is an American magazine published monthly by Consumers Union. It publishes reviews and comparisons of consumer products and services based on reporting and results from its in-house testing laboratory. It also publishes cleaning and general buying guides. It has approximately 4 million subscribers and an annual testing budget of approximately $21 million U.S. The annual Consumer Reports new car issue, released every April, is typically the magazine's best-selling issue and is thought to influence millions of automobile purchasesFact: date=May 2007.

Objectivity

Consumer Reports does not print outside advertising, accept free product samples, or permit the commercial use of its reviews for selling products. Its publisher states that this policy allows the magazine to "maintain our independence and impartiality... that CU has no agenda other than the interests of consumers."ConsumerReports.org - Our mission

Consumer Reports states that all tested products are purchased at retail by its staff, that no free samples are accepted from manufacturers, and that this avoids the possibility of bias from bribery or from being given "better than average" samples.

Ancillary publications

ConsumerReports.org, the related website, claims more paid subscribers than any other publication-based Web site.Fact: date=May 2008 Most of its information is available only to paid subscribers.

ConsumerReports.org provides updates on product availability, and adds new products to previously published test results. In addition, the online data includes coverage that is not published in the magazine; for example, vehicle reliability (frequency of repair) tables online extend over the full 10 model years reported in the Annual Questionnaires, whereas the magazine has only a six-year history of each model.

Magazine copies distributed in Canada include a small four-page supplement called "Canada Extra," explaining how the magazine's findings apply to that country and lists the examined items available there.

In 2002, Consumers Union launched the grant-funded project Consumer Reports WebWatch, which aims to improve the credibility of Web sites through investigative reporting, publicizing best-practices standards, and publishing a list of sites that comply with the standards. WebWatch has worked with the Stanford Web Credibility Project, Harvard University's Berkman Center, The Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, and others. WebWatch is a member of ICANN, the W3C and the Internet Society. Its content is free.

In 2005 Consumers Union launched the service Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs, which takes publicly available (but difficult to comprehend) studies on pharmaceutical effectiveness and combines them with pricing information with a goal of having an easy-to-read format.