Member Update: Help Us Choose The Look Of The Autopian Television Network — Also Trivia News And ‘Off-Road 101’ Preview

Good afternoon, y’all. I was excited to see our membership this week jump to a very Porsche 944 and then a very Volvo 945 in a matter of minutes. Once we hit 1,000 members (or the end of August) we’ll cool it a bit on the membership push and just go back to your more regularly scheduled programming. Honestly, when I was out, we sort of did cool it, but members kept pouring in, which was awesome. Thank you!

I have a lot of updates coming up and I think we’re going to skip Tales from the Slack this week because most of our conversations have been around David’s Zoo/Jeep and he’s already written about it today.  I hope you can read through all these updates at some point this weekend because they can hopefully answer some of your burning questions.

We’re Going To Launch The Autopian Television Network Soon And We Need Your Help

Here’s an interesting thing about the media world: Everyone wants you to do video, and video is hard and expensive. Because we’re associated with Galpin Media we have access to an amazing video team and we’ve been diligently at work shooting videos and creating series we can soon run, though we share the video team so there are some practical limits to how much we can use them.

But where to run these videos? The most obvious solution is YouTube, which is where our videos currently live. I don’t foresee a future where we’re not putting videos on YouTube. Unfortunately, the YouTube ecosystem has become way more competitive, and the amount of money the company gives to creators has been less reliable according to our friends in the space. There’s also the issue of YouTube deciding what our viewers watch next and not us.

Almost all of our car-blog competitors use so-called “white label” players that work kind of like YouTube and allow us to choose, directly or algorithmically, what to show people. Additionally, a lot of these companies allow us to run our own ads or, even better, will just sell the ads for us. This is an ideal solution, except…

These players do a lot of annoying things:

• Autoplay sound, which is something we want to never do.
• Become a “sticky player” that pops up on the sidebar and never leaves.
• Runs two ads, waits 15 seconds, runs two more ads.

The reasoning behind these annoyances are purely practical: You can show people more ads and guarantee nearly 100% view-ability of those ads. Advertisers love it. Publishers love it. I’m pretty sure no readers love it. I had a phone call with a representative for one of these firms who was shocked when I said it wasn’t worth it to us. I’ve seen a contract that basically required using all of these features.

Thankfully, we found a company that offers a high quality and useful one of these players that will allow us to do none of the above. It’ll mean less money for us, likely, but our theory on all of this has been that it’ll all even out because people will choose to watch our videos as opposed to being forced to watch them. And part of the reason we want to have membership is so that we’re not cornered into clouding our page with ads.

My thought with this is that we create a custom player frame and brand ourselves the “Autopian Television Network (ATN).” We’ll have a couple of different player styles: One for when we premiere a new video (that shows you all the videos in that series) and one that lives on all news pages and shows you the videos that most match the content (e.g. an EV piece may have David’s i3 videos on it).

Jason has created a few looks for how these frames might look above, but I’d love to get your feedback on what you’d prefer. Do you like the big/old VCR look? Something way smaller and trimmer? Something with a bit of a car frame? Let us know. The goal is to start testing this in the coming weeks.

[Editor’s Note: So to be clear, we’re going to have a video player in our posts. It will autoplay, but it won’t play sound, it won’t be a “sticky,” it won’t be a popup. It’ll just be like a regular ad we have now, except there will be some motion involved. We’d obviously going to listen to your feedback; we want to bring in revenue to become sustainable, but we also want this place to be awesome for users. So maybe give it a try for a bit, and hopefully it’s no real detriment and we can all focus on Jason’s taillight-sushi content and not the little ads between paragraphs. -DT]. 

Off-Road 101 Classes Are Coming

Have you ever wanted to learn how to off road? Are you an experienced off-roader who wants a refresher? It looks like we’ll be teaming up with the people who run Detroit 4 Fest to offer an Off-Road 101 Class.

The classes should occur between September 8th and September 10th at Holly Oaks ORV Park in Holly, Michigan. There’s a chance you’ll get to meet an Autopian writer or two, and our goal is to offer both a significant discount to members as well as a special sticker for participating.

We still have some details to finalize before this is officially official, but if you’re anywhere near Michigan (or up for an adventure) put this in your calendar and save the date.

Trivia Is Coming!

• Who?: Autopian Velour and Rich Corinthian Leather members
• What?: Autopian Trivia
• When?: August 11, 2023. 5:30 P.M. Pacific, 8:30 P.M. ET. Expect it to last a couple of hours. Bring a drink!
• Where?: Zoom. We’ll send the link!
• Why?: Because it’s fun!
• How (will we get the answers right)?: Only the car-gods can help you. It will be tough!

Merch Update

Thank you to everyone who signed up during the summer membership drive and apologies that we haven’t yet shipped shirts/badges to everyone. Our partner, Syd, has helped us make some awesome membership merch but it’s been harder for her to keep up with all the orders. In the interim, we’re going to in-source membership fulfillment so we can make sure we catch up and speed up the process. If you signed up prior to the summer drive and haven’t gotten your gear please let us know by emailing shipping@theautopin.com. Everyone else please sit tight as we plan to start shipping next week.

Changing Your Display Name On The Autopian Is Now Easier!

If you ever wanted to change your display name in WordPress it was a kind of annoying process wherein you had to email Matt directly. The good news is: If you update your First Name/Last Name in Memberful it’ll now automatically update on the site.

If you have any other tech issues email matt at matt@theautopian.com and he can help.

Don’t Forget About The Discord

Do you use Discord? Join about 300 of your closest Autopian friends to continue the conversation on our very lively Discord server.

That’s all folks, thank you!