All of media is in a transition phase, which is a nice way of saying that it’s FUBAR. The concept of the web was that the people who make the things, by gaining access to massive distribution, would avoid the centralization that made old media kind of bad and boring.
That’s not exactly what happened. Yes, many people can self-publish and that’s a good thing, but we’ve somehow wound up in a situation wherein we’ve eroded the faith in large media organizations to the point where Big Media no longer serves the important role it once did in our complicated democracy and instead replaced it with, I don’t know, Danica Patrick talking about how Justin Beiber is a lizard person and the moon landing is fake.
This issue is even more acute for video and, in particular, for automotive video media due to the still high production costs associated with doing anything with cars. There was a period of time in between /DRIVE and MotorTrend becoming a part of the original Google/YouTube content creators program and roughly the start of the pandemic that saw a lot of great talents and individuals flourish.
Then there was a period in all sorts of media (podcasts, newspapers, et cetera) where the original owners got out/sold, new money came in, and everything got briefly more interesting and then suddenly much worse. If you were on the outside you maybe didn’t recognize this, but creators did, which is why there’s been months of the biggest creators bolting the channels that made them.
What’s going on here?
Spilling Some Auto Tea
A few days ago this video popped up from a creator named Tiernan, who was a longtime contributor to Donut Media and there during the channel’s successful rise. Rather than explain only why he was quitting, he pointed out why it seemed like everyone was leaving (and teased more departures at Donut Media).
It’s a good video and I even like some of the little asides where he jumps in and says he’s been encouraged to not talk about this like he’s some sort of automotive whistleblower. I don’t know Tiernan, but he clearly understands how YouTube measures attention and optimizes for it.
It’s not that long of a video and you should watch it (link here if it’s blocked at work) because the points are valid and it explains, quickly, why there’s been a lot of this lately:
While some of the individual situations between CarThrottle, Hoongian, and Donut Media are a little different, they all follow a pattern that Tiernan describes quite succinctly:
- Passionate creatives build company, experience huge growth in YouTube/Insta expansion era.
- Original owners sell for reasons, new money comes in.
- Company gets resold or restructured, cuts costs, squeezes creative, and loses sight of what makes content good in the first place.
- Lacking any true “moat” people leave to start something new.
Here’s a video from Top Dead Center (Will and Edwin from CarThrottle) that follows that pattern almost perfectly:
All of this makes sense and is also similar to our experience here when David and Jason left the old lighting site to join forces with Beau and Galpin to create a new website.
Recurrent/Drive/The Drive/Donut And The Problem
While I don’t love the way private equity and media tend to mix, I’m going to start by saying that my experience with most media companies is that rarely does someone get into this business without some sort of Charles Foster Kane-like interest in media itself, which is to say I’ll give people the benefit of the doubt that no one who ruined these channels set out to ruin channels/lives/blogs/media.
So why does this keep happening? Let’s look at /DRIVE, now The /DRIVE, which is owned by Recurrent Ventures, which also bought Donut Media. I’ve got a lot of background here because I was friends with the /DRIVE crew when they started, did a couple of shows with them, and eventually worked for the company that sold /DRIVE under bad circumstances.
I’m not going to do a whole history of /DRIVE, but it essentially came to exist when YouTube was purchased by Google and decided it wanted to be more than cat videos. Google put in around $100 million into its Content Creators Program and gave that money to various companies to produce better content.
On the car side, they offered money to MotorTrend, TopGear, and Car And Driver (Hearst). Top Gear famously declined the money, so instead, a new group was formed with media exec Emil Rensing and a production company called TangentVector (my former employer). They teamed up with a group of creators that included Chris Harris and Matt Farah.
The channel was a huge success, immediately, boosted by the winning combo of the collection of generational talent (in front of and behind the camera) and the support of Google itself. Did it make a ton of money? Not really, and eventually, Google started pulling back its support and told the channel it would have to survive on its own. Around this time, it was discovered that Emil Rensing stole millions from another company he worked for and, likely, misled the people involved with /DRIVE who co-owned the channel.
Conveniently, Time Inc. decided it wanted to be a part of this new media universe as there was an assumption that there was a ton of money to be made in media (including with a site devoted to… breakfast). Everyone wanted to be Vice or Buzzfeed or Business Insider (the only one of those companies to sell early enough to make real money). The rapidly rising valuations of these companies, primarily propped up by traffic granted by social media sites like Facebook, made this an attractive proposition.
Time spent maybe a billion dollars building a new media space called The Foundry in an old dock space in New York City and bought /DRIVE, rebranded it The /DRIVE, and hired a bunch of writers. The channel itself lost its biggest voices, including Farah and Harris, as well as a lot of the video staff. Quickly the channel lost its mojo and, in short order, Time itself realized spending all this money had netted it very little and the company (along with The /DRIVE) was sold to Meredith, Inc.
What did Meredith, which seems to have bought Time for its food/lifestyle/wellness brands, want with a car website? Nothing, apparently, and it sold to a group called North Equity (since rebranded Recurrent Ventures), which also bought Popular Science, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, and created The War Zone from the bones of Foxtrot Alpha. I did a small amount of work for Recurrent and have interacted with its boss, Andrew Perlman, who has a taste in weird cars that seemingly makes him a decent person to be in charge of a car website.
My sense of Perlman and North Equity/Recurrent Ventures is that the company seems to have wanted to bundle enough sites together to be extremely profitable from gaining some economies of scale and either go public or sell, which is where the real payouts are in this business (no one seems content to make healthy margins year-after-year and employ people who love to do what they do).
From day one, the overwhelming emphasis at Recurrent Ventures was on e-commerce—specifically, referral links where websites get commissions if you buy a product listed in its “reviews,” which were less hands-on tests and more aggregations of existing Amazon reviews. A lot of publishers in recent years have played that game; Google, the primary driver of traffic to such “reviews,” responded by bringing the hammer down hard on them. Those changes have been apocalyptic for media companies like Recurrent, leaving them scrambling to find another way to pay the bills until the next algorithmic change comes along and nukes them from orbit yet again.
In spite of owning one of the original great YouTube channels, Recurrent bought Donut Media from co-founders Matt Levin, Ben Conrad, and Nick Moceri to boost the company’s video presence. That aggressive e-commerce focus is what made the Donut Media purchase, Recurrent’s largest-ever acquisition at the time, so strange. After all, product reviews were never really Donut Media’s game.
Again, I have no reason to believe that there was anything here but a desire to make great stuff and make a lot of money doing so. Unfortunately, around this time Recurrent itself made a deal with large private equity firm Blackstone to access about $300 million to finance more deals. I say unfortunately because that deal went south fast as the overall environment (including Google changes), overhiring, and attempts to squeeze more money out of product reviews of questionable value made the economic upside less obvious. Recurrent bled staff and shut down properties.
According to Tiernan, this turmoil seemed to have landed in Donut Media’s world as well, and the company (even if it was profitable, and I’ve heard that it was) did what companies in these positions tend to do and tried to MBA their way to efficiency by cutting costs, thus ruining the very thing that made the brand valuable.
Again, the individual circumstances vary, but you can apply a variation of this timeline to Univision/GO Media/Deadspin, CarThrottle, and Hoonigan.
Who Should You Be Mad At?
I’ve seen these deals go bad. I’ve been a part of these bad deals. I’ve seen so many people suffer. It would be easy to say that there’s an obvious enemy here, like private equity, but it’s not quite that simple.
Should you be mad at the founders who sold? I don’t think so. People are allowed to build businesses and sell them and often, as with Hoonigan, that was part of the original plan. I was talking to another publisher recently and they were sharing how hard this business is and how much work they were putting into just breaking even, which I can relate to. After all that hard work people are allowed to recoup some of the value they put into their projects. They may regret it later, but selling either to get some value or to expand a business is completely understandable.
Should you be mad at the people who buy these companies? Not necessarily. This is a little bit more case-by-case, but I’ve never met anyone who buys one of these companies with the stated goal of making them suck. They’re buying companies that are typically profitable with the hope that they can make them more profitable. It’s just a side effect of our economic system that, even in times of low interest rates, borrowing a lot of money isn’t easy, and the people who have the money to give out expect massive and quick returns of the type that are difficult to achieve in this business.
Should you be mad at the employees who quit? Absolutely not. In most of these situations, the creators who are involved don’t own a piece of the business and it’s their right and duty in a free market to take their labor where it’s most beneficial to them, which is what they’re doing. This also makes the acquisition of these companies so weird. I talk about “moats” all the time around here, which is the idea in business that what you do has to be protected in some way from other people taking or copying what you do. If your creators are your business and the money you make is from YouTube, which is free to use, then what are you really buying other than a brand and some subscribers?
Should you be mad at Facebook and Google? Maybe. All of us, including this website, rely on the major players on the web to keep ourselves alive. We rely on Google search and other traffic and we use Google’s ad network and Google’s ad management software to control our ads. We rely less on Facebook, but I know plenty of other sites that are reeling from the lack of Facebook traffic.
With a switch to AI-produced results, Google could absolutely wipe out more sites, including us.
What Can You Do About This?
Subscribe to your favorite channels, follow these creators when they leave, but also give to their Patreon accounts, and buy their merch, as well as watch their stuff. If I can put in a plug, become a member of this site if you enjoy reading it. The more we can rely on our readers and members, the less worried we have to be about changes in the larger ecosystem.
My belief is that we can continue to build a great site, that you love, that employs great people, and makes enough money to keep us happy.
You should be madnat Capitalism. Capitalism is ruining your life, name your enemy and get it gone!
No thanks. I’m still riding capitalism’s 5000 year winning streak, friend.
While the USA’s particular brand of laissez-faire capitalism has always presented problems for the masses, I still think that this post-1980s venture capital model is something different (and much worse). That’s because these VC firms do not practice commerce. In the olden days, even when a big company devoured a smaller one and ground it into the dirt, it was for the sake of commerce: “This other business can give us something we need to make our own business better/more profitable.”
VC operates in a system designed around commerce, yet it does not perform commerce. It’s not about making the acquired business better, or using it to improve their own business; it’s about stripping the financial assets away from the acquired company, and moving on. The “system” always had a lot of things wrong with it, but it was not designed to protect itself against such a nihilistic business model, and so the VC’s are destroying almost everything in their path with impunity.
As is often the case, the movie Wall St. captured it well. At some point Gekko says to Bud “I create nothing. I own. We make the rules.”
“We the American working population
Hate the fact that eight hours a day
Is wasted on chasing the dream of someone that isn’t us
And we may not hate our jobs
But we hate jobs in general
That don’t have to do with fighting our own causes
We the American working population
Hate the nine to five day-in day-out
But we’d rather be supporting ourselves
By being paid to perfect the pasttimes
That we have harbored based solely on the fact
That it makes us smile if it sounds dope”
– Aesop Rock
Linus Tech Tips and their youtube media empire are very open and have had entire episodes of The WAN Show where Linus and Luke talk about the business side of it and get into the details.
They seem to be very aware that this current media thing relies on some luck and can disappear in a second.
Private equity firms remind me a lot of car flippers. They do little to add value and often do plenty to detract from it, yet somehow still manage to sell for a profit in the end. Like flippers, they’re also reprehensible bottom-feeders.
I am intimately familiar with digital advertising in video, and honestly don’t understand how anyone makes money splitting revenue with Google/YouTube. It’s such a lopsided model in their favor. I guess that’s why so many creators do sponsored content, but I wonder if YouTube has figured out a way to take a cut of that as well.
I agree. I’m not intimately familiar, but, google is the devil. I’ve canceled by premium membership to youtube. Deleted the app on my phone. And now just watch on my ipad if I want. Hopefully the proliferation of cloud based infrastructure can alleviate googles strangle hold on content creators. We need to go back to creator owned sites and content.
I haven’t figured that out yet. Sponsored content also allows content creators to get around YouTube Premium and other ad blockers.
Quick aside, why do we call the old site “the old lightning site”?
It’s “the old LIGHTING site”. I think it’s a reference to Toch’s obsession with taillights, where that started, and I imagine he was encouraged to continue focusing on them. I could be wrong.
There is/was a German website about lightbulbs and shit with a very similar name, and it became a Thing.
Jenoptik is the company being referred to
That’s the one!
That sounds a bit more plausible for the crowd. Good to know!
Thank you
Damn dyslexia, it’ll get me from time to time
It’s a long running joke.
Here’s Mercedes oppo:
Let me be clear here, us at the Autopian calling it “The Old Site” or “The German Lighting Site” is just a long-running inside joke. We found an old German company that produces light fixtures with a name that reads like a slightly misspelled Jalopnik. It’s merely a joke that stuck around, like our random mentions of “shower spaghetti” lately.
Most Autopian writers and editors came from Jalopnik and we’re still friends with most of our former colleagues. We wish them continued success, because the world needs more sites with unique voices on transportation. Two Jalop editors and a Car and Driver editor came to David’s going away party!
20 seconds quicker…. 🙂
Taken from Oppo back in 2023: https://opposite-lock.com/topic/68148/jalopnick-and-oppo-a-wee-rant/23
Let me be clear here, us at the Autopian calling it “The Old Site” or “The German Lighting Site” is just a long-running inside joke. We found an old German company that produces light fixtures with a name that reads like a slightly misspelled Jalopnik. It’s merely a joke that stuck around, like our random mentions of “shower spaghetti” lately.
Most Autopian writers and editors came from Jalopnik and we’re still friends with most of our former colleagues. We wish them continued success, because the world needs more sites with unique voices on transportation. Two Jalop editors and a Car and Driver editor came to David’s going away party!
If there’s one thing to take away from the last 20 years, it’s this: when you see a person with a lot of money, that’s all you’re seeing: a person with money. You’re not seeing someone smarter, more talented, wiser, better, or prettier than average, just someone with more money than average. Money and merit aren’t completely uncorrelated, but the presence or absence of one really doesn’t tell you a hell of a lot about the other. There might’ve been some signal there at some point, but there sure isn’t much now.
Also, yes, for the love of christ, do what Matt suggests: if you like something and you want it to stick around, pay for it.
You are really blowing up some deep seated American mythology here, watch out for the black helicopters
This isn’t a unique to web thing. You can see it in everything, your local (successful) independent cafe sells to someone who isn’t passionate about coffee and food, but saw a successful business and thinks they can keep it going through their “business genius” which they don’t really have. And it fails under new ownership because they don’t actually understand what made the business work, they don’t understand that their customers were coming in for that special something that you took away becuase you found a cheaper supplier. It’s the same with the web content, just watch any of the stuff Alex Kersten has said about Car Throttle, they were told at one point that they couldn’t buy a £200 car – all they did was buy cheap cars and everyone watched – the creatives and the talent were squeezed by the “business heads” who thought they knew best. Now car throttle is a dead brand realistically. The same will happen to Donut
Yep. This is exactly what happened to the ONE chain here that did a gottdanged döner kebab. I am left in a döner desert now because the out-of-towners figured that they should pivot to being just another generic Mediterranean joint (which we have a billion of) instead of Turkish/German kebab (which we had this chain for) and I hate it. It’s like buyers should listen to the people who built the thing into something popular or something. Novel idea, that.
(RIP Verts. All my homies miss Verts.)
I don’t really have a solution here but it really feels like google needs broken up. They have so much monopoly on web traffic. I remember the late 90s and early 2000s where there were dozens of competitive search engines and filters for web traffic but it is crazy how Google can pick winners and losers on the internet right now.
It’s not like there aren’t several major competitors to Google. They exist. They also offer an inferior experience, which is why I don’t use them. I can’t say I’m mad that the market player with the best product is the most successful.
You can type “duckduckgo” or “bing” into Google right now and Google will take you right to their competitors. I can’t say I see any evidence whatsoever of anticompetitive business practices.
there has been a lot of talk in the last 6 months how google search is getting worse and worse. and with googles AI search feature it attempts to give you the “answer” to your question without even taking you off site to where it got information from so you stay on their platform and don’t leave google. It’s great for most users because all they want to know is “how many stripes does a zebra have” but the zebrafacts.com website lost the traffic. If Zebrafacts.com can’t pay their web hosting bills they pull the plug on the site. And that process repeats for tons of websites we enjoy like Autopian.
Google is only good for very basic questions like that or things you kind of already know the answer to. But if I’m on one of my research deep dives on some random thing, it’s genuinely useless. I use duckduckgo for that because it actually works.
Fun fact: google’s predective search and AI nonsense has made it completely impossible to search for the Mazda RX-5. Go ahead and try it, just type in Mazda RX-5 with no years or anything and see what happens. It just goes “surely you must have meant MX-5” and only shows you ND Miata content. The only way to get any real RX-5 results is to put in a specific year or search for a Cosmo instead.
see this is exactly what the world needs is actual examples of google not googling shit like it’s supposed to! people have been talking about it but we need a website / video series dedicated to examples like this!
Pro tip- search Mazda “RX-5” instead.
And the logical conclusion of AI search is an internet full of nothing but AI generated content referencing AI generated content
It also sucks that SEO has become more or less irrelevant because organic search results have been pushed further and further down the page, to the point that they don’t appear “above the fold” anymore. And unless the theory that says that most of the traffic will go to the top three results for any search was bullshit, Google isn’t a search engine anymore.
Add to that that Google has made the advertising such that unless you are spending a lot of money on advertising, you’re not going to get anywhere (It used to be that creativity could stretch a small budget. Not anymore.) And the changes to Analytics have made it much more difficult to quantify ROI for said advertising.
Google isn’t just google.com. The parent company is called alphabet for a reason, they are striving for monopoly of internet traffic not just search engines.
Then you are blind. Google isn’t a search engine anymore, it is an advertising platform.
Good lord. You can type “google anticompetitive practices” into Google right now and see soem evidence of anticompetitive busienss practices.
Bing is actually good, for now
When I was still in radio 1990, or thereabouts, CBS did an early episode of the show 48 hours. It was devoted to the future of radio in the US markets. Talk radio was already a thing, and FM was growing as well. And the majority of the show was about how the god damned venture cap boys, Wall Street, and business deregulation was eventually going to end up hurting the industry in the long run.
They also addressed the birth of Satellite radio. And they were spot on in predicting history. 35 years later, I can’t think of a soul who I knew in radio, (even the really young guys and gals) they all bailed soon after the smaller independent markets were bought up and consolidated.
My belabored point here is that money, greed and other dumb shit ruined FM radio as we knew it 35, even 20 years ago.
We are fools to not believe that the same isn’t happening on the inter webs.
Letting the record labels buy all the radio stations nuked radio and music as a whole. Fortunately it looks like consumers are using streaming services to “branch out” and find new artists and the cream is rising to the top DESPITE the record label monopoly. And younger artists are starting to be willing to branch out on their own and independently distribute their music even risking making less money in the process.
Yes, while I do miss the days of a “good” radio station that would surprise you with a deep cut or a band you never heard of, the fact I have almost every album ever at my finger tips on Apple Music has led to me discovering far more music than I ever would have relying on even the coolest disc jockey.
Hell, see a band mentioned here on Morning Dump, I can go listen to the whole damn discography while I work.
Consolidation has destroyed (and continues to destroy) a lot. Tricky to find a solution to that, other than maybe turning all businesses into cooperatives. But that ain’t gonna happen. Serious attention to anti-monopoly and anti-competitive situations, but where you gonna find the politicians to do that?
I entered university in the late 80’s to study for a bachelor’s in Broadcasting. I thought that I might work in radio. By the time I graduated in 1993, they had changed the name of the degree to Electronic Media and I had figured out that working in commercial radio was a recipe for a miserable job making poverty wages. Being a car fanatic anyway, I pivoted to the service side of the auto business. MBA-driven stupidity eventually burned me anyway – I worked for Chrysler Corp/DaimlerChrysler/Chrysler LLC – but I had some good times with some good people and the pay was decent (and stable) for quite a while. I was fortunate to get on with a well-run auto company about ten years ago. And, for the most part, I only listen to public radio. Yes, I donate to my local NPR station. Shout out to the Twin Cities’ 89.3 The Current!
Twin Cities! Lived in Golden Valley. About 10 years, great place for a kid to grow up.
Glad to know you avoided the hell known as broadcast radio.
The answer to the question, “who to be mad at,” is late stage capitalism.
It is going to destroy everything good as it takes us all down. Enshittification of everything.
All the dystopian sci-fi books I read as a kid were actually documentaries from the future
What even is “late stage capitalism”, other than a made-up socialist talking point?
Manipulation of the masses and monopolization of the market to buy what they say.
We are living in the result of neoliberal policy allowing markets to police themselves, so I’d say it’s hardly imaginary
There are countless examples, but since this is a car site I’ll give you the most relevant one here: subscriptions fees to unlock features like seat heaters or extra power in your car. SaaS is another, more general example.
So no, not some “socialist talking point”.
It’s the point where capitalist driven ventures no longer settle for simply production and so they turn to predation. The production of a thing doesn’t bring the capital owners enough capital, and so the owners of the thing’s intellectual property such as patents and marketing begin killing competitors by force and creating cartels to ensure it is impossible for someone to usurp them, followed up by using what capital they currently have during that surge period to change laws or effectively disable the enforcement of laws that would prevent them from further predation, followed finally by erasing total ownership either by denying repair or turning all potential owners into renters instead.
Late stage capitalism is the proper name we give to the economic infrastructure alluded to in the phrase “You will own nothing and you will be happy.”
Can we talk about Hagerty?
There is a lot of high end content creation and the return on investment has to be negative based on video ad revenue views and no other sponsors that I am aware of.
This is the definition of a passion project for them and it seems their purpose is to get t views and brand recognition so potential customers will buy insurance from them for classic/specialty vehicles which has to be a very small market.
Some day they just might decide to sell off their venture to the next owners who think they can monetize those views or use the brand to grow. The reality is that they are giving us high end free content where the financials just cannot pencil out.
I will not be so mad if that happens because better to have experienced and lost than to never have experienced in the first place.
Hagerty is a big classic car insurance company. Their YouTube channel is definitely not a “passion project”. You said it yourself, it’s camouflaged insurance publicity that YouTube is at least partially subsidizing. That’s smart. In the past you had to pay to show your ads to people, now Google pays you. Starting from an already established company instead of a single random creator was genius.
I agree that their stuff is probably the best automotive content there is out there right now and that there are legit car geeks behind all of it, it shows, but a lot of what makes the channel work is due to Cammisa, lose the guy, it implodes.
It’s not just videos – I have Hagerty insurance for my cars, and one of the perks is that every couple months they send you their magazine, which is legit one of the best pieces of automotive print media I’ve ever seen. It is EXTREMELY good quality stuff, jam-packed with well-written and fascinating articles, stories, and opinion pieces about all different types of cars, and beautiful photography all throughout. I’ll often save a new issue for a trip and it’ll last me a week, there’s so much in it.
In an age where print media is dying and automotive magazines especially are struggling, Hagerty is keeping the art alive just as a perk of insuring your car through them. It’s my single favorite thing about them.
TBH, that perk is $70 bucks. I still like the magazine and subscribe.
ah – thanks for the note. I have Hagerty on my old van and was like “why don’t i get this cool magazine?!”
You don’t even need insurance with them to sign up for magazine.
https://www.hagerty.com/drivers-club/
good to know. I’ll consider it. my outrage was mostly that as a customer I thought I wasn’t getting the free magazine! but seeing as it’s add’l cost, I’m not feeling slighted
Ironically enough, when I was still writing for them I asked about insuring the Ferrari with them and they absolutely pitched a fit about it, citing conflict of interest even though I was only a contributor not staff. Now they dropped me because I was too outspoken and the car is insured with them because they were by far the cheapest this year.
Strange company. They bought up everything in the US, bought Radwood UK and Festival of the Unexceptional and appear to be ruining both. They let all their UK media side go (they had a couple of staffers) but have an expensive clubhouse at Bicester Heritage, and still appear to be producing some UK media with a few favoured stars (like Paul Cowland).
I think they got in over their heads buying up events. They bought up the Detroit Concours d’Elegance and made a big deal about how they’re moving it to the grounds of the art museum downtown which was a downgrade because you can’t fit as many cars there as you could at the golf course. Then after two years, they cancelled the show completely. We also lost the cool supporting events for the Concours like the always excellent cars and coffee they held and Concours d’Lemons
I was about to say: they’ve been cutting back from their peak expansion, editorially, car-show-wise and on the insurance side, too. I don’t have the same level of visibility into what’s going on there as I did with my ex-employers, but Hagerty’s big spend-a-palooza (and subsequent layoffs) gives me flashbacks to Recurrent’s strategy of “buy up as much as possible without a clear plan.”
(The 944 and 411 are on Hagerty as well…right before the local rep who convinced me to finally sign them up there was laid off. Ouch.)
I was discussing this topic with someone recently and stated Hagerty is about the only large company owned automotive Youtube channel I still subscribe to. Consistent quality.
I love their content but will never use their company since they denied coverage of my classic car. Been very happy with Grundy ever since.
What Hagerty is doing is a slightly more interesting version of Limu Emu, Flo, or the GEICO Gecko, but more targeted at enthusiasts. I know of a couple different entities who benefited in the short term from the Hagerty spending spree, but quickly dropped out for reasons.
I think most of the article is pretty obvious once it’s understood these aren’t just done lads with a camera, but proper businesses.
What’s interesting, is MCM is still doing pretty well, and while clearly a business, it’s not a corporate entity like these other channels, it’s a couple of lads who have evolved and learnt things to keep it as a viable income source.
I’m sure they have had offers, and even considered them at times, but stuck to their guns and method, resulting in what I think is a pretty authentic channel, even if everyone doesn’t get it.
Good example. The MCM team seem to have deliberately decided to keep going as independent, likely with awareness of what others were going through. And then try to achieve profitability through effective in-house merchandising and riding that line between enough sponsorship to survive but not quite enough to annoy their viewers.
Not sure if they are still doing much in their ‘day jobs’ though – difference between being Breakeven on a passion project and having a profitable full-time business. Must be pretty close to full time if not completely?The fact they can keep so much production in-house because of their background surely helps though, and maybe not something many others can replicate easily.
I have always enjoyed the writing from this team and whole heatedly wish to help support the site and creators to minimize reliance on obtrusive ads; However, as an infrequent reader and one with subscription fatigue, I am very reluctant to do another financial subscription.
I would love to see more merchandise (preferably with the site name) available in respect to clothing and car accessories. This would allow me to provide both financial and marketing support.
I want branded tools. Heck— I’m gonna buy them anyways, might as well buy them from Autopian
Torch is working on a socket set in Soviet sizing as we speak. I think it’s goes from a 9.3mm up to a 21.8mm socket, and includes an H adaptor.
Honestly though, the shop should include things like a 10mm socket set (where it’s just like 10 sockets and they are all 10mm), or the coffee filters from Mann and things like that.
Would selling scale models of the various concept cars Bishop makes be feasible? I know from firsthand experience licensing from a major automotive brand (dead or not) can be a bitch, but it does seem something to at least consider the cost versus profit of.
Probably not. A way to do it would be either cut out card models or modelling them in 3D and selling an .stl so people can print their own.
Unfortunately, once a .stl is in the wild, it will be shared and no more sales.
However, there is 3D print to demand and it may have enough of a margin to make it profitable to the site.
Good point I hadn’t thought if that.
There’s got to be at least 3 people here who would legit buy that.
T-shirts are always good since they’re easy to order from on-demand merchants, but from what a few youtubers have said moving to selling physical goods in general is a rough business. Can be lots of money and work up front with no guarantee of coming out ahead.
Dope article, the kind that requires not only years/ decades long worth of understanding of an industry but also spinning up great, up to the minute recent events. Thanks for sharing Matt.
Hi everyone! I’m the editor-in-chief of The Drive and I wanted to hop in here to clarify a couple things. Matt is correct in his summary of what happened with YouTube and our ownership between 2012 and 2019 (which I wrote about extensively back in Feb, if you want more details), and it remains one of the ultimate cautionary tales about corporate involvement in a beloved creative space.
Over the last five years, a dedicated team has worked nonstop to build thedrive.com into an industry standard. Of course like many brands today we’ve both benefited and suffered from decisions made above our heads, and experienced explosive growth and regression in turn. There have been great times and hard times. But this retelling makes it sound a bit like we’re a lost cause when that’s not the case at all.
In fact, earlier this year we finally relaunched our YouTube channel with two new shows—Carisma, which I like to call Petrolicious-but-not-for-assholes, and a storytelling series hosted by me. We’ve been putting out a new video every week for months now, so if this is the first you’re hearing, you’ve got a nice backlog of content to plow through. The site is still humming along with a fresh redesign that’s pissed off a lot of people in the grand tradition of site redesigns. That stuff wouldn’t be happening if we were being wrung out for pennies.
It wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment on the Donut situation at length. What I will say is that Donut sold itself because it was a business experiencing massive growth with even more massive potential, and everyone knew it. Since then, subscribers jumped by 50%, and what you’re seeing today has a lot to do with the implications of that surge, as Jerry and Jobe say in their video.
I like the site redesign!
Why thank you. I do too, but you can’t win em all!
ditching the war zone stuff on the site was a very good decision. kudos.
Seriously, that content didn’t belong and was commingled, so I just couldn’t read the drive at all.
Same, definitely spend more time over there now. Wish the comment section wasn’t full of steakheads but you can’t have it all I suppose.
I appreciate that. We are slowly cleaning things up there.
Mute them. It works well and makes the comments bearable. I do the same over at TWZ
When TWZ first appeared, I really appreciated the insightful comments from current and former military. Of course that didn’t last.
TWZ has good writing but the commenters can be a bit unhinged. Some seem to actively desire a nuclear exchange with Russia and China and think the US will come out on top.
I feel you. We knew it made no sense, you can read more about why we ended up combined here: https://www.thedrive.com/news/bon-voyage-to-the-war-zone-now-an-independent-site
Thanks for making the change, and for the additional context!
So for the TLDR folks:
The /Drive was a money losing channel funded by Google. When Google stop supporting them they could not find other successful sources of revenue to cover costs and eventually sold themselves to legacy media who wanted to shortcut their online development process with a shoestring budget. They just kept getting kicked down the owner list, just like Susie the Little Blue Coupe, until the last owner killed them off.
I am sorry if this is a harsh recap, and I am sure there is a lot of nuance, but I think this goes back to a point no one really wants to talk about. Some of these channels would not exist in the first place if were not for optimistic/miscalculated views of the the automotive media industry and now the industry is drying up as cheap money goes away and investors actually demand a return on money.
You’re not being harsh, it’s a fair portrait of a brutal business. That’s why reader-supported places like this are so important to the future of automotive media.
On the other hand as an old fart here it is difficult to make ends meet, let alone afford extras like pay TV, or other subscription based services for some of us. Not complaining about the ask for funds at all. Just not able to, yet. I keep waiting on that Oil Sheik from Kenya to start sending me my dividends.
At this point it’s that or go on Jeopardy but that host freaks me out.
But this site is the best I have found and hope to be able to kick a buck or three that way soon. And wish you all continued excellence and success. As always deep thanks.
Yeah, and I personally subscribed to their payed service while it lasted. And I relly miss the /Afterdrive discussions that were great. Shame that the pay-to-view caused so much backslash. Just like Motortrend (also subscribed until it was not possible from Europe).
I mean producing videos cost. People get their living on those. For people wanting to get shit free, I would like to ask what did you do for free that’s beneficial to others? And it’s not like they were expensive. Most likely the watchers used more for snacks per episode than the whole month costed.
I especially find it weird that people shy away from liking and subscribing these channels they like, even when they are free.
If “liking and subscribing” did anything on YouTube anymore, I’d continue to do it. I’ve liked and subscribed to many channels, it doesn’t do anything for my feed, which is mostly filled with videos I’ve already watched (IMO because if you’ve watched some or all of a video, you’re likely to again) and videos the algorithm thinks I’ll like. Remember, YouTube – like everything else Alphabet – is an ad delivery platform first, a content delivery platform an increasingly distant second.
Sure it’s marginal, but helps channel in question and as it doesn’t cost anything, surely that’s not much off your back.
But anyho I think the current monetization system doesn’t really benefit YT nor the channels as everybody has to advertize something (not just the adds added by the YT) to keep them going.
Whether it is something off my back or not is irrelevant. What exactly does liking and subscribing do for the content creator, other than get them a plaque when they reach certain thresholds that you have to get to in order to monetize?
Dunno, about the details, I’m not a youtuber.
But if they ask this one thing, I really do not get why it’s so big deal for some people.
Because I like to know why I’m doing things, especially when I’m not seeing the result of the thing that I am doing. A lot of people just blindly do things. I’m not one of those.
Liking a video helps increase its reach in the YouTube algorithm to find new viewers, who will hopefully also like it, and so on. The snowball effect. Subscriber numbers are more of a vanity thing but doing so also serves an important function. When you publish a video, it’s always shown to your most engaged subscribers first. If they watch/like/comment, it’s a signal to YouTube that this video is potentially popular and it will start to show it to more non-subscribers, who hopefully do as well, and that’s how viral hits happen. It sucks that liking and subscribing doesn’t seem to help the quality of the user experience, but it definitely helps your favorite channels.
Your site and here are the two sites I go to for automotive news. Each has a unique perspective. The redesign is mighty fine, BTW.
Also, it’s great to see people supporting each other!
Thanks! It’s a pretty small community of people who are trying to do auto media for the right reasons, so we got to support!
Seriously, glad to hear you guys are doing better nowadays.
Thanks so much Stef.
So, how long until I can download The Autopian TV app and find all the best automotive media creators putting out their passion projects? 😉
“…did what companies in these positions tend to do and tried to MBA their way to efficiency by cutting costs, thus ruining the very thing that made the brand valuable.”
This^ Right here^
MBA is more detrimental to the world than Lawyer – in my opinion. Whether Media, Manufacturing or Medicine they have no connection to the business at hand. It’s just numbers that need to be optimized in order to raise stock price and insure a bonus.
But we must bow down to our Key Performance Indicators! How else will we get our bonuses?
Hah! I have to deal with multiple KPIs being wielded by different teams and dept.s like some kind of statistical trench warfare. AND the Department of Health on top of that, who have… notions… about how things work. Also, no bonuses ????
Boeing is the prime example of this right now. MBAs (who clearly know NOTHING about building anything, let alone aircraft) took one of the greatest design and manufacturing companies in the world and ran it into the ground.
…ran it into the, ooohhh…
> aggregations of existing Amazon reviews. A lot of publishers in recent years have played that game; Google, the primary driver of traffic to such “reviews,” responded by bringing the hammer down hard on them. Those changes have been apocalyptic for media companies like Recurrent
Not soon and not apocalyptic enough. That content is entirely useless. The humans who used to write it can 100% be replaced by an LLM, so even if it was still a money maker for the publishers, those writing jobs are gone.
Support the creators directly! Subscribe to this site, buy music off Band camp, buy official merch from the artists, kick some $ to their Patreon, go see live music and theater.
Why not just…not have that spammy content anyway? I don’t want to read an aggregated review sheet that 97 pages are doing. I really don’t want to read anything puked out by an LLM — at least the bland aggregation gave some entry-level or freelance workers some experience, even if it was not great. Give me primary sources. Get me to people who’ve had their hands on the thing that’s getting reviewed. That’s what I want. No one needs more pages that exist only to game search results.
Yeah, that shit is toxic waste.
Love what you guys have built here, totally worth being a member. To me it doesn’t feel like some sort of subscription. It feels like I’m just chipping in to pay my part of the bills so that we can all keep this place humming.
The problem with private equity is that the model is unsustainable.
A lot of companies have a growth ceiling – which is fine, there are only so many people who need/want X. If you are in it to just have a good living for yourself and your employees, you can work within that. You don’t need endless expansion, you just need to make enough money to be profitable. I think about my uncle, who has plenty of money, but has a company with limited growth potential – he runs an OEM for a farm product. He’s told me he will never sell – though he might move to an employee-owned structure when he fully retires – because he’s hit that spot where the company is profitable, everyone makes good money, but they probably can’t actually grow that much.
Private equity needs a company to make more money to justify the purchase. You spend a few million on something, you want to make it back. So a little company that’s doing alright for itself suddenly has this burden placed on it: We need to make more money than you ever have before, because we’ve got to pay back our investment. A place that’s humming along being as profitable as it basically can be, when bought out, now has to find ways to make more money. If you can’t move into more markets, you have to cut costs. And then the cut costs mean you lose quality, and then customers lose confidence, and eventually you’re dead.
Leveraged buyouts are the worst of this. No matter how much money a company makes, the amount of debt they get saddled with makes it impossible to turn a profit. And then you can’t be a Toys ‘R’ Us kid anymore.
Not everyone who is handed the reigns is necessarily bad, sometimes they want to make good product, but the problem with private equity and a lot of investment like it is that it demands perpetual growth instead of stable profit. At some point we have to admit that instead of seeking better numbers we have to admit that making the same amount of money as last month is actually great.
I don’t know what kind of a demented coked out ghoul invented LBOs, but they should be in prison for money laundering.
Private equity is why Chrysler Remington went bankrupt as Mr Sigma failed upward. For that matter private equity and financial engineering is why Colt is now a subsidiary of CZ. Tektronix is one of the few examples of a company thriving after a buyout
Notice how private equity acquisitions only became the operational norm for vultures after the 2008 recession. Specifically after 2011, when companies had been operating in month to month survival mode for years at that point. The boards and management had already been acclimated to thinking only short term, and so the return to long term stability was repulsed by a new school of thought by investors. The worst were pensions and managed 401(k)s, as they were often held by hedge funds under your employer’s discretion, and with the threat of lost pensions as Boomers were retiring in droves these hedge funds grabbed at anything that grew month to month so they would have liquidity and be able to stay above inflation. This was exacerbated by the Silicon Valley startup explosion that happened between 2006 and 2014 and made consistent quarterly growth look standard instead of being an extreme anomaly, reinforcing the pressure from investors who were buying into the perpetual growth lie. That insane growth was enabled by breaking all sorts of laws domestic and international and rushing forward with technology before new laws to protect people could be enacted, but the suits didn’t quite understand that and thought that the growth was enabled by valuing systems over employees. That misunderstanding of valuing systems over employees then bled into the tech world as businessmen replaced engineers and journeymen as the chief executives of these companies. By 2015 the feedback loop had laid all the paving stones for the road to techno hell we’re currently trudging along.
George Dubya Bush shoulders a lot of the blame by removing taxation and stock evaluation restrictions that even the spectre of ruin Reagan himself wouldn’t touch, but this mess had been building ever since the early 1980s when the Chicago School methodology finally took over the business world and demonized stability. Despite the zealots appearing as early as 1978 things wouldn’t destabilize enough to break ground until 2002, and the Chicagoan followers wouldn’t be able to plant until 2008 when that insane economic instability finally let them hijack or topple the institutions that had thrived under the Keynesian and Orthodox systems.
Once again I can shout “Damn you Friedman!”
In her defense, Danica Patrick contributes nothing of substance to any of her other commenting roles, so this is completely on brand…
God, please, keep her away from the Indy 500 broadcasts.
Hopefully Fox doesn’t hire her now that they’ll have IndyCar coverage starting next year.
Still trying to understand why Drive To Survive thought it needed her “insight” last season…
She wasn’t terrible, just not very relevant.
Takes one to know one.
Takes a lizard person to know a lizard person?
No comment.
Inane in the membrane!
Here’s what our friend James Martin had to say on the subject about a year ago:
https://youtu.be/z588KOrIxIA?si=kqTgRplTYbAoiV5R
That was a very good video that explains a lot about what’s happend to youtube, and the saddest part is when he said he’d make more money by trying on different lipsticks, I know he’s right.
I have a friend of a friend in private equity. One time he described looking into buying out Precious Moments (the figurine company) and being viscerally disgusted at how cloying their headquarters was, how the dolls were everywhere, how they even had a church themed around their bugeyed baby aesthetic. It really bugged me, even as someone who probably couldn’t last ten seconds in that setting without laughing at it. It just sucks that the people who want ownership of brands that are defined by their passionate, niche fanbase are openly contemptuous of that fanbase. I don’t know if there’s a structural way out of that system, but it’s so nonsensical that the more successful a media company is, the more likely they are to be bought out and controlled by people with an adverse relationship to creatives.
Man, if that guy ever said that about Puffalumps, I would throw hands.
This is why I am glad I am subscribed to Sarah-N-Tuned, Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, and Jill Ciminillo for my main truck/car stuff. They do it themselves without any beholdings to corporate whims.
I agree with most of that.
Sarah is a bit cringe to me, but solo Youtuber of choice is Sreten (M539 restorations)
You must be talking about Sarah’s preferred snack of shrimp tails.
Ahh, yes, the booby car restoration lady
I really can’t fault her for that, since “clicking on the thumbnail with the car and attractive person” is totally a thing. That said, she does do legitimately good mechanical and restoration work and her video production quality is consistently high, and her personality is actually more than just “I am a hot person”. I respect that the content she makes reflects her personality, and that’s one of the things I like about it – it’s not corporatized or trying to be completely inoffensive, and you can really tell that she LOVES cars and has a lot of deep knowledge about them.
I prefer the bad jokes and penguin sightings myself. Oh, and the way she just throws herself into the mystery that is wiring! That stuff is so intimidating that I’d trade my car in before trying to tackle that job.
Sarah is solid and is on my repeat watch list of auto YouTubers. Yes, she’s attractive and damn smart, and picky as all get out when doing restorations which I respect. Her dry sense of humor is pretty badass too.
Instead of having her build another giveaway car, I’d love it if she had a contest where the winner gets their car/truck “Sarah-N-Tuned”.