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.
I know this is a few days late, but I watched the “Why is everybody quitting” video last week and read the article today. It feels like a larger pattern of preferring unsustainable pursuit of maximum capital extraction over anything resembling sustainable profitability across what seems like every industry. It’s particularly bad in the creative industries, but certainly not limited to that.
Really would love a post-script from Torch or David here. Yeah, they were print first and video second, but obviously they have an insight into this that few do.
A lot of automotive YouTube channels seem to have the same creeping problem of bigger and bigger goals, bigger and bigger builds. Channels that used to be about somewhat normal cars all of a sudden become supercar channels as the creators get more and more money-flow in. It’s great you’re putting a $80,000 worth of parts into this truck but you kind of alienate the same people that were watching you scrounge together AutoZone parts to get your car running a few years ago.
It’s called Capitalism. It has always been this way. Read up on history of Capitalism. Making money any way possible
Same shit when you all left Jalopnik, then we all left it too.
You think it’s bad in Youtube??? I work in healthcare and these PE/VC’s are literally evil. They do everything to bilk every penny from both sick AND healthy people. It’s made me hate America.
I’ll blame private equity if I want to, thank you very much. Leeches on the backs of others who do the real work. Running this country into the ground through their own greed- be it media, cars, or housing.
Having tango’ed with such, I can tell you that venture just makes an offer with clear terms. The sellers (founders loving what they do) are the ones who accept the sometimes shitty rules. Sometimes it’s their own greed, sometimes it’s survival, and sometimes it’s just not understanding the damn terms sheet. Venture alone is not the culprit, although an enabler when shit goes south.
That is terribly unfair to many creators who are likely offered more than they’d ever imagined making in a lifetime and have families to think of. That makes it a super hard decision to make – refusing to sell, even if the small print is sketchy. Seems like an exercise in futility, pointing fingers at the people who end up selling, no matter their motives or how bad the terms they accept are. Sure, they may be marginally at fault, but losing time to point that out and calling founders who sell out greedy seems lilke a great way to deflect from the real problem here: PE/VC is cannibalising every industry it touches. If you want to point out greed, you can start with PE/VC.
Not blanket stating as I was hoping to make clear. And I had the particular case of Donut in mind: the three founders could have gotten the essential hosts who built the actual audience a slice of the action early on, whether from their share or before taking venture money. They chose to maximize their shares, let the creatives do the work as employees and let them leave when things became too tight and convoluted. Which is totally within their right, but there should be no shock and no deflection when said soul of the brand chooses to leave. The decision how to chart the company course was made with the new money team. Time will tell if they can reboot without so much talent departing.
And yes, also painfully aware that sometimes you have to choose between bad terms and folding. But until we change how society works, this is reality.
It wasn’t clear to me you were referring to a specific case; I do not have the details to be able to form an opinion on Donut, so I’m taking your word for it, and I agree the founders seem greedy. So yeah, not all cases are the same for sure, I’ll give you that. But the one common thing they all have in common is venture capital showing up with some big numbers upfront and proceeding to steer these businesses into total collapse, because they fundamentally misunderstand what makes these media outlets work. They’re blind to the fact that being different from traditional formats is what makes them special, and immediately start applying either traditional or “disruptive” media practices (often the former branded as the latter).
It isn’t just these automotive creators and their websites, the entire automotive enthusiast ecosystem is rife with these vulture capitalists. I spent a decade at what was once the world’s largest racing and driving school 😉 and the model was the same, as it was for probably a half dozen such companies I can think of off the top of my head.
I believe that after a couple decades in the VC/PE wilderness, the school I worked for is in good hands because some enthusiasts were able to buy it at the bankruptcy sale.
It is hard to have a sustainable competitive advantage when barriers to entry are low (or in this case, nonexistent).
I’m not sure they really are low. There is a massive difference between the algorithmic value of [fill in]’s YouTube Channel and mine. They’ve got large back catalogs and millions of subscribers. I have four subscribers, who are assuredly planning to scam me and I need to block two of them. Yes, we can all put a new video up at the same cost, but their past investment is going to make the marginal value of theirs massively more valuable than mine.
Why do so many of them close ? Maybe are there too many of them ?
Regular Car Reviews – but, to be clear, RCR with Mr Regular doing the talking and The Roman not narrating, sorry Nick, you write great but your voice distracts from what the channel usually is, thank you very much), plus anything with Harris and Camissa in it, TFL (or whatever its name was, the one with the father and son and 4x4s, and that’s before they started getting boring looking outside of 4x4s), and that’s about all I need.
The challenge is that they are labor-intensive, but not particularly profitable.
Newsflash: this is literally every industry that venture capital touches. They buy businesses with a slightly upwards stonks line and immediately want to make the line go vertical for all eternity. The slightlest slump is faced as a crisis, people get laid off, more management is hired because the fault is always at the bottom of the chain, and you don’t contradict the people with the money.
The Autopian is a clear attempt to fight that if you ask me. Financial backing comes from a true enthusiast who trusts the people around him to produce good content, and likely didn’t go in splashing millions on superficial stuff to then count every content-creation penny. Seems like a way more sustainable model, where there’s transparency about the site being the media arm of Galpin, but not to an extent that degrades the content by itself – in fact, all Galpin-related content seems extremely well curated, and far from flooding the article feed. Kudos to Beau for seemingly being a passionate, yet serious investor who understands that content is better left in the hands of creators.
Couldn’t have said it better.
The Autopian is the only content I’ve ever paid for and it’s been worth every penny.
Content here is worth every penny precisely because it isn’t being made primarily to multiply pennies endlessly. Unlike when you have PE/VC running the show.
Fantastic article. I’m not smart on any of it, and just learned a lot. You’ve motivated me to go premium & buy merch because I love reading all the articles on this site, have followed many of the authors for years, and have a better understanding of why subscriptions are important – especially for stuff that I enjoy on a daily basis. I really don’t want this site to go down the same path you described.
Tell Torch and Tracy they can’t sell this place.
I’ve never worked in media but have spent my career working in PE/VC backed tech…on the finance side…and it gets ugly. Back to the media stuff, it’s gotten really easy for me to pare down to this site, Defector, and a CL to look for bad project cars. As a BMWfile I still love M539 Restos on YouTube and buy his merch from time to time, and still tune into Regular Car Reviews. I recall Mr. Regular did a quick video about how YouTube ain’t what it used to be a few months back.
RCR is a gem and we should protect that national treasure at all costs, but yeah. One of the reasons YouTube was never appealing to me, personally speaking, was that you’re just beholden to a different corporate overlord who you have even less visibility into. In that case, it’s Alphabet/Google/YouTube (pick your site or company name poison). They determine how much you get. They can demonetize you for the wackiest reasons and getting remonetized is a beast. They determine how you show up in search or recommendation feeds. It’s going independent, but…sort of. Kind of. Partially. The independent part is all the other stuff you’ve got to do to make that work. Most have other sources of revenue (Patreon, merch, etc.) or other platforms they cross-post to (hi, TikTok) for a good reason.
I’ll gladly hop onto someone else’s ‘tube and help out, but there’s just so much of it that sounds like a slog now unless you’ve got a solid group to get going and split the duties.
Footnote that you were good at it, though. I still remember the MR2 video you did – you had a unique voice and I enjoyed it.
But I’m a miserable failure in most things, so If I like something you should probably not invest yourself in that thing.
You’re not a failure! I don’t believe that for a second.
(Also, thanks!)
These investment groups seem to operate on the principal of squeezing maximum profit out of an acquisition for a few years and then throwing away the withered husk even if the company could have easily been a very long-term success. They’d rather make $10 million in profit per year for 2 years and then declare bankruptcy than make $5 million in profit per year for 20 years. I’ve seen it happen to plenty of other businesses; I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that it’s happening to YouTube channels now.
Yes, but they are also going to do that ten more times in that same 20 year period.
I won’t dispute that running businesses into the ground isn’t profitable for the investors but it still sucks for the employees, customers, and community.
As someone who was previously laid off from Recurrent after months of them assuring us, “oh, no, it was just Mel that was underperforming, you’re all safe,” I will absolutely blame poor leadership for the mediapocalypse going on now, especially when it goes in with seemingly no plan and spends on new media properties like they’re baked off their gourds and logged into Amazon with Mom’s credit card.
When I was writing for The Drive, I was cautiously optimistic when it got bought by North Equity. The higher-ups liked what we did. The buyers were an equity firm (bad!), but seemed to be car guys who wanted to invest in us (good!). It felt like less like a PE firm swooping in, and more like a passion project at first. They wanted to revive the YouTube channel (which only just now happened?) and expand the staff (which happened for a while and then…LOL). Then they kept buying up other sites instead of allocating the kinds of resources to us that we’d hoped for based on that first contact. Some purchases even felt like competitors with brands that were already in-house. Others just didn’t work out. Car Bibles’ URL was apparently DOA in Google’s eyes from its prior lower-quality/affiliate-link-heavy content, and instead of keeping the staff’s work up or keeping a redirect live to Car Bibles’ articles that were reposted on The Drive, they just straight-up nuked it, leaving a flurry of dead links and less work for writers to refer to when seeking new jobs or referring to past projects. Overall, it was a pattern of “buy your way to growth” I recognized from my brief time in tech that rarely ever works out as a sustainable long-term strategy.
Surprise! It didn’t work at Recurrent, either. I should’ve prepped my damn resume the second I saw that spending spree get going at full speed. The lack of transparency or a clear plan they had with us was appalling, too. I remember editorial pushing back on the higher-ups’ idea of Drive-branded NFTs, for Pete’s sake — a thing that absolutely no one, under any circumstances, actually needs. The impression I got was that they were tilting at windmills to capture whatever hype cycle was in the headlines with no clear plan to make their purchases work as a cohesive, well-managed network in the long-term. (To be clear: all of those opaque shenanigans were above the site-level management. The editorial-side teams are good crews who do good work and deserve better.)
Granted, my impression of the company is from the era of me getting surprise-laid-off from the company by a dude I’d never met while my EIC was reviewing a car in Spain and (IIRC) my direct editor was also OOO, so I can’t speak to how they’re doing at the moment, but I gotta say the ex-Donutters’ announcements pass my gut check. Hopefully there is better management in the picture there now, though. I see The Drive’s at least finally getting some of the things they wanted for years.
So, congrats, private equity fellas! You brought this round of negative press on yourselves. Maybe there were good intentions to start off with, but they clearly went off the rails shortly afterwards and I think poor management is culprit number one (with Google/Facebook/etc. shortly behind) in what’s killing this industry. Not going in with a clear plan or a long-term vision. Not demonstrating that you value your staff, be it by not listening to them when they know more than you do about their audience, not offering competitive pay and benefits, or by not offering them opportunities to advance. Relying too heavily on one revenue stream and leaving yourself excessively vulnerable to Google search changes or algorithmic changes at Facebook or YouTube. You can’t just do one or two things and expect it to work anymore, like loading the page up with ads that drive away your readership (hi, Get/Out Media!). Things like that. Those are management issues and too many media overlords today belong straight in the bin.
Note: I Went Off (TM) before I noticed Kyle (The Drive’s EIC, and a good dude) chimed in about the site’s current status, which appears to be on the up-and-up. Go read his comment on the previous page, too. I may have a lot of leftover anger over how a whole lot of us were treated by Recurrent, but I want the staff members who were spared the seemingly random-feeling axe* to get to do bigger and cooler stuff, and it looks like they’re finally getting that chance.
*Recurrent axed Kevin Williams at the same time as me (who’s been kicking ass with in-depth EV coverage lately) and later obliterated PopSci’s masthead, for Pete’s sake. Not great!
I gotta say there is nothing that links private equity with creativity. It’s all about return on investment. I work for a company owned by PE, but it is all about branding and capturing market share. IMO there’s nothing wrong with that. My co-workers and boss are awesome, salary and benefits are good. But I know that once the owners see that they can score more cash by dismantling the company my position is at risk.
They’ve taken the risk, and it’s all about the rewards.
I worked with a CFO at a small company one time, and he shared with me the basic truth. “Business exists to generate wealth for the owners.”
I hope only the best for creative automotive content, here at Autopian, and elsewhere. But as soon as you choose financial returns over creative license, look out.
These PE guys don’t understand successful companies and products are built from passion. They just see a cash-generating machine. When you start messing with the product and kill the passion and enthusiasm that created it, there is nothing left. You can’t mess too much with what made it a successful and appealing enterprise. Unfortunately, simply making a profit isn’t enough for a lot of investors. They want to make huge profits as fast as possible. Greed ends up killing the business. I’d rather have a steady but small profit than go for big bucks real quick (which may not work long-term). I guess I’m a horrible businessman because I care about people and quality.
Man, the old site is just plain ripping you guys off now.
https://jalopnik.com/heres-why-so-many-people-are-quitting-big-youtube-car-c-1851566397
I mean at least they changed a couple of words in the headline…”unique content”
To be fair, AutoTea’s video is blowing up all over the place among car people. I’m almost certain it’s a case of convergent…er, not evolution, but uh, editorial? Convergent editorial? That thing that happens where two independent branches of the media-verse cover the same story because it makes sense to do so. We need a name for that, but that happens a lot. There’s usually no ill will or attempt to copy (and Collin’s too good of a dude to pull that anyway), just “this is big and we should cover this.”
(I’d imagine they might need to tiptoe around some elements of the story a bit more over there, though. Signed, Someone who left Jellopicnic before it was cool.)
I get it, but when you use literally the same screenshot and headline, that’s just plain lazy. Top stories are top stories, but here, there’s some insight and addition. There, it may be a half a step above a ChatGPT generated article.
Not a knock against Collin, but sometimes you’re just a product of your environment.
While I don’t know from personal experience, I imagine this what it feels like to have parents that divorced. I still go to the old site, but feel kind of guilty and it’s just not the same any more, then I come here and have a much better time, and get much more attention!
Maybe not, but there are absolutely private equity firms who buy companies with the intent of bleeding them dry and then filing for bankruptcy, which is basically the same thing.
Two thoughts on this:
I’m a longtime ChrisFix, Project Farm, Regular Car Reviews follower, and to a lesser degree Torque Test Channel and Logically Explained. There are even some other channels that hailed from the old media days like Motor Week and its retro reviews which I can’t say no to, but pretty much everything else I used to dig for has changed over the years (for worse) and it’s now all about baked in sponsors even if I paid membership and YouTube Premium.
And now I realize some of these changes might not even be the idea of the channel’s creator but likely from new owners trying to squeeze as much as they can from their purchase. Well, some channel founders are even getting ahead of the game and doing this and I can’t blame them, they want to be profitable, it’s just not worth it for me.
Just another example of The Worsening™ when it comes to the internet. So much of what I loved about the internet is gone or substantially worse, usually in the effort of trying to squeeze a buck out of everything. I owe so much of my life to the internet (I met my wife of 12 years on Craigslist!) and I truly believe 2005-2010 was peak. Give me back forums and Youtube when it was people sharing dumb videos for the heck of it and Craigslist and eBay back when it was a virtual flea market.
Enshittification: https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456
See also: BaT when you actually had to B a T.
Is it bad that I feel like I was prepared for something like this because of what happened to Rooster Teeth? Like The Drive, they got bought out twice, although RT’s first buyout actually seemed pretty decent, if not good for them. The second one, I mean, the company no longer exists so, that wasn’t good.
It honestly kinda sucks from an entertainment standpoint because together, many of these guys made pure gold. But this is also what they want, so I’m not gonna argue.
Isn’t this nearly all industries-original creators are passionate about creating a product and are in touch with who their product caters to. Eventually for whatever reason get picked up by money-ed 3rd parties who then try to milk as much money out of it as possible, ruining the passionate product focus that made it good in the first place. They then sell to another owner who tries even harder to squeeze the remaining juice. Rinse and repeat. Can’t blame the founders if someone offered me $$$$ to sell something I’d built and get a guaranteed pay day I’m sure I’d take it, but it’s a bummer that it happens nonetheless.
I have been watching this situation closely and when watching the BigTime video connected a lot with what they were saying. A few years ago I worked for a fairly large speed shop and it was trying to become bigger and at the same time hired a lot of people with no interest in cars but instead to focus on the business development. What it led to was a constant kneecapping of the ability to grow the car side of things and eventually they laid off 9 of us. It felt like a much smaller scale version of what they referenced in their video.
On paper what the leadership wanted to do made sense, they wanted to cut out all one-off/unique projects to instead focus on packages and repeatability. Being near a Marine Corp base this mostly consisted of Mustang/Mopar/Subarus. The focus became “how many header and cam jobs can we sell to Mopars”, “How many IAG blocks and FP turbos can we sell to Subarus”, “How many superchargers can we sell to Mustangs” and they stopped accepting jobs for anything older than ~2005 model year or so. These projects did sell well for a time and were repeatable but it took a lot of the spirit out of the sales people and techs and the customers sensed it too. The social media and general advertising became very boring. No matter how many sales were made, it was never enough to satisfy the ever moving goals.
I was happy to be cut and was halfway out the door anyways, but I know exactly what these guys felt as they were making their decision. Recently the company I worked for majorly downsized and shut down their big location in Richmond, VA laying off around 25 employees. It was a very expected outcome.
This is a much bigger discussion than youtube itself -it’s about diversification. Relying on a single platform that you don’t control for revenue is a disastrous business model.
Google since it’s inception has had the business model of incentivizing content creation by sharing revenue/eyeballs and then slowly filtering away said eyeballs and offering the ability to purchase them back. Put bluntly Google is Adwords – that is what pays the bills.
Now it’s pert near impossible to build an audience without them so you have to play the game but if you want legs in the industry you need to be converting the eyeballs into offline revenue. Carshows, WrenchIns, Merch, Subscription revenue/Email Lists, industry knowledge sharing agreements, data mining.
It sucks but that is what it takes to survive today.
This might be an even bigger issue: the free web. Generation X/Millennials saw the benefits of the Internet over old media and embraced it. That did lead to a lot of the issues in this article. But younger generations were born into an “everything is free” Internet, which we know, is not true. I’m a fan of the direct support methods (subscription, membership) for content I follow, but will younger enthusiasts step up as they gain disposable income? Or will they expect everything they consume to be free, and the Google ad/AI boom explodes?
I’d argue that it has never been free, it’s been an altruistic relationship where by visitors get free information/entertainment in exchange for sharing their data and being marketed at.
Many are waking up to the fact that their data is valuable and/or being misused they feel. Its why tracking cookies for things like google analytics went away.
On the opposite side content creators who relied on google for traffic have seen their revenue sources dry up one by one- display ad rates, affiliate links being punished by googles helpful content update, youtube revenue sharing diminishing and AI stealing their content and removing the need to visit the sites at all.
The scales are unbalanced currently for sure.
It;s interesting to see this for R&T and C/D. Now that they’re jointly owned, they seem to want to sell five-day car and wine experiences or Thermal Club meets to dentists to pay the bills.
Paying the bills is tricky these days for sure.
R&T & C&D were owned by the same company back in the 90s. Maybe that changed since then and they’re back together, though.
i mean as long as my main man ChrisFix doesn’t go away I’ll be okay. I like TRQ and 1A auto videos but its nice to see an “independent” option.
I’m mad at the Dodge Brothers. They’re the ones who took Ford to court a hundred years ago and set the precedent that corporations must put the interest of their shareholders above the interests of their customers, and their employees.
As soon as any business sells out to a major corporation the clock begins to tick. Their goal is no longer to produce a product to enrich the lives of their customers. Instead their only purpose is to make sure that make profit, and that the profit they make is more than the profit they made last year. Then do that every year until they collapse.
Not car related, but I think Valve is a great example here. While most of the video game market is on fire, and once great titans of the industry are standing atop the sinking ships that are their reputations… Valve is still just doing whatever. They made a great platform for people to buy and play games on. They don’t make games just for the sake of having something new to sell each year. They make sure every product they put out is made well, and with care, and in turn, they are rewarded for it with long term, dedicated customers.
I was under the impression and admittedly didn’t know the exact genesis of it that this truly became the preached dogma at business schools starting in the late ’70s onwards and is what lead to the shareholder value above all else as a near religious orthodoxy in the MBA class?
Half Life 3 confirmed.
Except Valve is no longer a content creation company, they’re a distribution company. The vast majority of their money comes from being the Google of the games distribution space, in that everyone has to pay them their cut or they get no visibility with their target market.
I mean, just look at their list of published games. In the past 10 years, they’ve released two-ish real games (-ish because Alyx was VR-only, which so drastically limits the target market that I’m not sure it counts as a full game). That’s not the behavior of a games studio, at least not one that intends to survive on sales of its games.