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.
“ Should you be mad at the founders who sold?”
Not exactly mad… but these guys all could have went to the bank, took out a loan to fund an ESOP and walked away with a lot of money (but not nearly as much as they did walk away with for sure).
We need to develop a plan where founders can be tax advantaged to sell their companies to their employees.
It is a nice idea, but I’d guess a lot of these companies didn’t have the cash flows to obtain a big bank loan to do an ESOP. And if the seller financed the deal, he/she would be taking a lot of risk compared to taking a check from a private equity company or media conglomerate.
You are not wrong at all. Having said that, if your cash flow can’t satisfy a bank, why would it satisfy private equity? They demand more return than a bank does.
Private equity is more willing to take a risk on potential future returns; the bank wants to see up front that you can actually achieve those returns.
The bank’s low reward is why it’s only willing to take low risk.
Not mad, just disappointed.
exactly, it’s greed on behalf of the sellers and greed on behalf of the new owners that enshitificates companies; founders make more money selling to some private equity firm, period, employees be damned – have fun with your new corporate overlords, we got ours.
nevermind the fact that it is the employees who are largely responsible for the success that allowed to them to sell for $$$$ in the first place.
ESOP’s are just the next level in tax evasion and money extraction.
Owners “sell” the company to their employees, taking cash out of the business while being able to maintain full control as the board of directors. The employees do not typically have voting shares.
At that point the company also no longer pays income tax (!) so there’s all that extra cash to funnel to the former owners.
Google is evil. It does it’s best to destroy everyone else to ensure it controls all internet monetization. Private equity is evil, short-sighted and foolish. They overpay to get profitable companies and then try to strip-mine them for maximum profit in the shortest period of time available. Show me one company that has been purchased by private equity that has improved their product and profitability long-term. The vast majority of business these days wants to make a quick buck and is not satisfied with long term, reasonable returns. None of these people are interested in building “generational” wealth. As long as “market cap” is the be all and end all of business value, things will not improve.
OTOH remixing other low-value content to generate worthless SEO fodder is also evil.
I agree that private equity is mostly evil (see Rolling Stone’s article about Mitt Romney & Bain Capital) but I have a client which is an exception — they were likely on the brink of bankruptcy and a private equity company saw the potential, bought up a big chunk, imposed some fiscal discipline (not “lay off half the company” but “every product sold must meet this margin so we’re actually profitable”) and now a decade later they’re several times bigger than they were both in terms of sales and employees and the private equity firm still owns it (no strip and flip). They’re not perfect, but it beats dissolution.
That’s wonderful, but definitely the exception, not the rule when it comes to private equity.
Company buys mildly profitable business it doesn’t understand.hoping to make bigger profit.
Company suddenly realizes its mistake.
Company puts shitty people in charge of said business because the good people are all busy doing good work elsewhere.
Shitty people run company they don’t understand into the ground.
It’s a story as old as time. Had they actually put competent people in charge that were interested in making the business work instead of their own egos, it might have been a different one.
It is rarely a mistake for them though. While they might not make as much as they hoped they rarely lose money.
Not making as much as forecasted is a mistake in their eyes.
Yep, watch how the venture capitalists look at stocks. A company losing money, but losing a little less than projected, can see massive valuation increases. A company making money, but slightly less than projected, can see wild downswings. It’s not about making a profit, it’s about maximizing the value when it comes time to sell.
Exactly, I just saw this with my company. The profits were higher than the company forecast but not the forecast the stock market expected so the stock price dropped
Appreciate the summation. That video popped up in my feed this week, but I don’t like to give views to things that seem clickbaity.
Same. Also I’ve never really cared for Donut Media’s creations.
why/how do they need to make faces? I don’t get it. why also DO THERE have to be MASSIVE all CAPS words too?
I saw somewhere that this appeases the algorithm somehow. Faces, larger heads, making faces and looking at their right (our left) apparently help the video to climb up.
I mean, maybe, but fuck all that.
Yeah, agreed, fuck that indeed. This cursed algorithm is making everythin around us so, so dumb…
Yeah, I remember reading that; there is a couple of channels I watch that do the dumb thumbnails (and they occasionally reference having to do it, with plaintive, aggrieved sighs). However, I watched them before they started doing the thumbnails because I genuinely like the content, and just about everyone else who does it gets a “stop suggesting channel” from me.
Even worse are the channels that do clickbaity titles. I was getting suggestions for this bass guitar guy’s videos, and every. single. title. was “I did [thing] and it sounded [DESCRIPTION]”, run through a mad libs generator. Awful. Guy might be good at what he does, who knows? Won’t be me though.
Hoovie’s garage was the first one I noticed doing this. “My [expensive car] is [broken/trashed/bankrupting me], I have to SELL EVERYTHING”.
I have a hard time watching Hoovie at all now. Haven’t watched a video of his in months. His most recent video is the first I have watched just to see what the current situation was and…yeah it was what I expected. “I am in financial ruin from trying to do the same thing with expensive cars that I used to do with cheap ones…also here is more bad decisions and my new house and garage”. I don’t think I will be subscribed much longer.
It’s an algorithm thing. Matt Farah went off on why he does the Cringey Face Thing a while ago: YouTube prioritizes it.
I don’t know if anyone actually likes it (creators included), but get that bag, man. You gotta do what you gotta do.
Have seen this so many times. New guy comes in and takes a piss down your throat, allows you to like it and moves on to command the downward spiral of whatever department/company/nation state that is the thing of the moment.
This article plus Elon equals The Morning Show season 3, no?
Welcome to capitalism, I guess. Over in the magazine world, I watched companies buy and sell both Car and Driver and Road & Track and pull the plug on Automobile.
I’ve seen this in my industry, legal support, and my wife, who’s in banking, has certainly seen acquisitions and mergers.
I think we might get a sort of second generation of YouTube content generators that may have a vision of a decent job they can keep for a long time as opposed to someone that wants to build something they can sell.
I remember when Car and Driver did an in-depth article about Geico Insurance. Geico then bought them up so they couldn’t do articles against them after that.
That radar gun article made me swear GEICO off forever.
Yep.
Exactly what I expected.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s “media”…it’s all business. I’ve seen this first-hand in two completely separate businesses. Both were purchased by private equity firms and both became completely “rudder-less”, trying desperately to make more money while alienating those that had serious vision and were responsible for growing the firm to a noticeable size in the first place. You lose the cornerstone, the edifice will collapse.
I’m sure they’re great and all, but I don’t have the patience to watch these videos, let alone track down something that might interest me. My phone’s YouTube app is set to not look at my history for suggestions. I guess I’m glad, maybe, that my formative media-consuming years were all text-based.
Instructional YouTube videos are the bane of my existence. If I’m looking up instructions or help, I get so irritated when the top several results all assume I want to watch a video. Just give me the info I need in a text- and/or image-based way that I can go through at my own pace. I don’t want to wait for the video to catch up or stop it so I can.
I also don’t have the patience for YouTube content, but instructional videos are a special hell for me.
If this site ever remedies the inexplicable absence of opposable thumbs in its comment section, I will gladly add two of them here. But in agreement, not opposition, so maybe the smiley face can suffice.
Hear, hear. I have seen very few videos that are better than a text with some photographs or illustrations.
There are times where someone showing me what they’re doing as opposed to writing about it is helpful, but I do mourn the loss of text-based how-tos.
Seriously. I’m just glad 944 people will defend Clark’s Garage at all costs in all its old-school HTML glory. I hate having to resort to a video. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
It depends for me. I’d rather watch someone demonstrate a technique than read two paragraphs about it. I think that using both a manual and a video to reinforce what’s written in the manual works best for me.
Stuff like how to get those freaking German connectors apart or how something looks when it’s properly assembled. That stuff, the “soft skills” part is always helpful for me.
I’m torn. Sometimes I’m infuriated because all I want is a small specific piece of information that I could read in 3 seconds instead of digging out of a 15-minute video. But when I actually do want to know how to do something physically a short video is better than pages of description and images.
Some of the problem comes from the push to turn every hobby (really everything) into an income stream. The culture of side hustles, everything as an investment, and the grind…it’s all supposed to make you money, which, in turn, means it’s all supposed to make money for others. When you have journalists, entertainers, hobbyists, and opportunists all competing for market share, the folks with the money can pay everyone less. In turn, that pushes even more people to side hustles and the like.
YouTube paid out enough money to attract talent and corner the market, while also telling everyone who enjoyed it that they could make money, too. But Google doesn’t make the big money by making everyone a success story. The investors tried to suck every dime they could out of the success stories, which means cutting costs, pursuing questionable partnerships, and exerting editorial control. And now, everyone with money is moving on to the next thing because the market’s saturated. Google’s gonna keep taking dollars of ad revenue and passing along pennies. A few big names will keep making massive money because they need the success stories to drive more content from people trying to make it big.
It sucks because you see a lot of good content lost in the noise, and a lot of good people struggling to make it in a space that previously rewarded them. And there’s not a lot of new spaces that offer the kind of large audience or their previous pay. Twitch was trying to pull the same YouTube trick, but I don’t know if that’s worked out well for many people except a few gamers.
“Some of the problem comes from the push to turn every hobby (really everything) into an income stream.”
This part, specifically. Doing something you enjoy or are passionate about is supposed to be FUN. It’s often a bad idea to milk your joy for profit. It’s why most new restaurants fail – they’re opened by people who enjoy cooking and are good at it, but those folks aren’t very business-minded, and they watch their joy turn into a not-very-productive grind.
I do blame YouTube for getting everyone hooked onto its platform and then squeezing content creators dry, with lower and lower ad revenue. As Hardigree states, production costs are high, but the benefit is low.
A lot of people are having success on TikTok, but that’s not a platform that lends itself to long-form, educational, easy-to-find content, and its legal standing and future in the US are tenuous.
I don’t know what post-Golden Era looks like for automotive entertainment and education, but it seems like it’ll be bleak. It does look like we’ll be doing a lot more paying for content outright, which is fine with me.
TikTokers are moving over to YouTube because it pays better.
I don’t know if anything has changed, but this was predicted in the early days of TikTok because of they way their monetization system worked. Instead of revenue sharing, they set aside a fixed pot of money to pay creators. That means the more successful creators there are on the platform, the less money each one gets because it spreads the fixed pot around more.
I assume the pot has grown over the years, but it still means your payday depends on everyone else’s payday instead of your own performance, which is pretty sucky.
This guy frequently post how much he makes on various platforms. You might find it interesting.
https://youtu.be/dg3p-qZS9g4?si=iAoBQfHVWB3lZumo
Not related to the point of this article but the new carisma series from The /Drive is superb.
Thank you so much, means a lot
Honestly, superb is an understatement.
Reading between the lines it sounds like some of these high profile names were money losing, subsidized, or low margin businesses that were bought by legacy media companies and investment companies at too high of multiples.
When they tried to make the numbers penciled out they realized “oh shit, we overpaid” or “oh shit, our growth projections were unsustainable” and then gut the company to make them attractive to the next buyer/sucker.
Talent then gets pissed because “hey, we were use to a certain level or creativity and budget” and now we are getting neither. So they venture out on their own and hope for the best (try to grown it organically) or repeat the cycle of burning cash hoping to be bought out by the next round of buyers.
This is going in Hollywood right now, to an extent, where a lot of money was thrown at original content in the streaming wars between Netflix and all the other players. A lot of people lived in a unsustainable bubble and when the money dried up it left a lot of people hurt.
Not every buyout is led by greedy corporations looking to squeeze every last cent of value before discarding the carcass. A lot of them are just idiots good at raising money.
I’m gonna take an outrage siesta (watching Jalopnik/Kotaku die, then The Drive, and actually just sort of fading out of any car culture at all for a while) and say that I appreciate the inside baseball stories.
What we do with it is up to us, but I find the candor much more interesting and invigorating than the company-mandated-investor-simping (“we know this will make us stronger and give us more resources to bring you the content you love!” despite knowing they’d just been shuffled like so many other cards into a rapacious yet indifferent investor’s deck) I’ve seen various editors-in-chief write on various front pages.
Yeah, private equity may not be the ultimate reason for these failures but they are the main reason. None of them are interested in creating something with a healthy profit margin that will last the test of time. It’s just buy that hot new thing and suck as much money as they can from it. Then throw it in the trash when they ultimately kill/ruin it. They can’t run these companies effectively because much like the people who run tech companies these days, these firms are filled with unimaginative and boring grifters who contribute nothing to the world. Their only interest is finding new ways to steal more money and not pay the labor who created it for them. Does every YouTube channel need to exist out there? I don’t really know, maybe not, but the economic forces that run things these days are backed by truly some of the worst people out there. I know that’s essentially been the case forever but there really aren’t proper guardrails out there to keep things in check.
This one I disagree with. As someone who’s been part of a handful of acquisitions, the incoming CEO will almost always be like “Now I know this isn’t going to be easy, but we’re laying off half the company and we’re all just gonna have to step up.” They fucking know exactly what they’re doing; they’re just isolated from the consequences.
The charitable interpretation is that they have no idea what makes [X] successful/special, and they gut it in an attempt to “streamline.”
Really, though, they’re basically vampires sucking out all the money they can and trying to pass the husk off as a living entity before the next sucker notices. Or they are just buying a brand and have no interest in the business/people/product.
Tiernan succinctly describes exactly what every new management wants. The new corporate lizards don’t make a distinction between good creative content and bad content because they don’t care. They are only want cheap content instead of expensive content. This totally disrespects formerly loyal viewers, because the corporate lizards are assuming that we won’t be able to tell the difference. This is part of the lizard’s elite superiority complex. I hope they all fail.
You can tell that Tiernan cares about what he produced and the team he worked with. I’ll bet the lizards are glad he quit. They just want employees who will regurgitate corporate press releases to sell more products. A good example of this is The Drive. The new website is heavy on product placement.
“A good example of this is The Drive. The new website is heavy on product placement.” And crappy product placement at that. I swear much of it reads like fantasy theories of how something might work.
It’s similar to what happened to Hot Rod magazine years ago. It went from at least a percentage of content on “how to do X or Y” to “buy this product” and flat out infomercial type articles.
Totally agree. The Drive and other click bait sites will not get any more clicks from me. Treat me like a I’m a Home Shopping Network viewer, then you’re dead to me forever.
I mean, with most of these things, it sounds like it was always a bit of a corporate product, just ones really committed to pulling in talented people and making quality product. Hoonigan at least felt centred around Ken Block, but other than that, were any of the others someone’s passion project?
Still, not putting Vance Johnston behind the wheel of something dirtbaggy and with too much engine and teaching him to do a burnout is a missed opportunity.
Thanks for the insight, reinforcement of what I thought was happening.
Stay as independent as you can, while keeping the options open.
Yet MotorWeek keeps chuggin’ along.
Local public broadcasting might be on to something here.
I still miss Jennifer Khasnabis.
Yolanda Vasquez’s eyebrows should be someone’s username.
I miss Pat Goss.
Private Equity is destroying everything.
huh… I wasn’t expecting the single best comment on this matter being 5 words.
Great article. For years beyond the german lighting site my favorite properties were Roadkill and Dirt Every Day over at MT. Subscribed to their platform and everything. Then they killed DED. And didn’t offer an app on my new TV. And then killed the MT platform to roll it into a more expensive Discovery streamer I didn’t want. Some of these companies absolutely don’t understand the properties they bought or why people like them.
I get all the MT stuff on the Max app which I was already paying for in addition to MT so I saved money.
I have Max but hadn’t looked for any of it. Good to know.
Miss Dirt Every Day
Apropos of absolutely nothing except my own presumed childhood hyperlexia and nominally high-functioning neurological differences, but does anyone else look at this statement in isolation and think it would be a great name for a gossipy drag queen pageant?
Agreed
Miss Eva-Rita Day-Dirt, maybe?? If “Family Guy’s” Carter Pewterschmidt’s wife were a revealed a drag queen now, liberated from the Hamptons and serving up the sauce on her hyphenated ex-friends.
Nevermind. “The Simpsons” did it already . . .
I miss DED but Dave Chappelle’s youtube channel is close enough
https://www.youtube.com/@thedirtheadshed
I love how all of the other MT presenters bring Dave in on their TY channels for him to do all the hard work. he just 4 linked Freiburgers Muscle Truck, and he did the dame for Derek’s 30’s ford.
Private equity is who you should be mad at. Corporate raiders who contribute nothing, steal everything, and discard the husk after all remaining value has been sucked dry. They take dreams and turn them into dollars (not for you though, just for them).
Every chain restaurant in California that is closing or cutting back blaming it on minimum wage, if you look at the history, they were recently acquired by a Private Equity firm.
The ones picking up on mildly successful Youtube channels and sucking the value dry from them gotta be on the extreme desperation side of the market
I watched this video yesterday, and some of my favorites have been lost as a result of this corporate BS. I’m having to follow specific people, like Alex of Autoalex, for example. DT and JT from Jalopnik (and to a much lesser extent…Mercedes…). Donut was never my thing, but I could see the value. TFL is becoming an ad for BIG AZZ TRUCKS© basically, with a smattering of high speed stuff. They just killed off the auction section, which was sad, as it gave ishboxes visibility.
The state of media in its entirety is sad. None to trust, and few available that don’t align with a specific, shall we say…viewpoint?
So in other words, big business did to this what they’ve done to every other great idea ever. Ruined it beyond recognition.
Yeah, that new COO looks like a real Hoonigan. Lock up your daughters, lock up your wife, lock up your back door, run for your life.
Vance Johnston’s back in town, so don’t you mess around.