Did YouTube Kill The Car Show? Part 2

Last week I wrote about the beginning and middle of televised car shows like Top Gear and The Grand Tour. Part 2 of a series on the end of the car show on television (and prestige streaming) takes a quick detour on the upheaval in automotive YouTube.

So this part should really be called, "Who nearly killed automotive YouTube?"

2023 and 2024 saw an incredible amount of change in automotive YouTube. Well known personalities left big-name channels, starting their own and creating a whole new sub-genre of video - the Why I Left...video

You can basically boil down automotive YouTube into three main groups.

1. Publications with successful channels
2. Independent channels built by individual(s).
3. Automotive influencers.

Let's start by working backwards, because I'm going to knock 2 and 3 off pretty quickly – they're fine. And when I say they're fine, not much has changed.

Automotive Influencers

The influencer world remains fairly obnoxious and concerned with headline-grabbing hypercars and tedious clickbait about which car they've bought/sold/crashed. None of that stuff interests me in the slightest but if it does you, have at it. These folks employ a lot of people so good luck to them.

Independent channels built by individual(s).

Group 2 is a bit more interesting. At the top you have folks like Doug DeMuro, Hoovie's Garage, Throttle House that kind of thing. This group is growing and it's largely at the expense of the first group, the publications with successful channels. Or formerly successful in some cases.

Most recently we've seen the implosion of Donut Media, or at least the departure of its most high-profile personality, James Pumphrey. Whether you're a fan of his or not, he was the beating heart of Donut. You could tell because he wore that heart on his sleeve.

He admits in his Why I Left Donut video that while he can sometimes rub people up the wrong way - meaning management - he knew his heart wasn't in it anymore. He has a new channel, Speeed that has already garnered over a million subscribers and 8 million-plus views from just three videos (at the time of writing).

Two other well-know faces, Jeremiah Burton and Zach Jobe have also departed the channel, leaving the talented Nolan Sykes as the face of Donut. Burton and Jobe's new channel, Big Time already has 1.5m subscribers.

Donut is just one channel. There are so many, "Why we left..." videos. Jumping to other side of the Atlantic, CarThrottle is a shadow of its former self after an exodus triggered by the departure of Alex Kersten.

Kersten left CarThrottle after ten years, having been responsible for guiding the site's social media and then video efforts. He was the face.

Kersten started his own channel AutoAlex before even leaving CarThrottle. Ethan Smales and Jack Joy were the last men standing after fellow CarThrottler Edwin Klinkenberg joined forces with ex-Overdrive talent Will Chandler to create Top Dead Center [sic].

Oh, and then Smales and Joy left to start All The Gear.

Kersten and his business partner Rory McKie (also ex-CarThrottle) appears to be at the centre of this as the three channels share resources, sponsors and sometimes crew. CarThrottle has attempted a reboot with new presenters but is a shadow of its former self.

While I'm here, being mean to these guys in the comments is bang out of order. A lot of the comments have the usual stench of toxic fandom and slagging the guys willing to pick up the pieces is real shoddy stuff. Give them a break and give them a chance. When you think about it, the job is impossible because they're left with the lowered budgets and ruinous management that broke the channel in the first place.

Anyway.

Why am I telling you all this? Because this problem is to do with what I like to refer to as the Private Equity (PE) Ponytails. And not necessarily those people, but people like them. MBAs (not a sledge)(or is it?) who come in to a business with next to no experience and run it with spreadsheets and ignorance.

The Venn diagram of PE Ponytails and TV people is almost a circle in that they like to attach themselves to a success and pretend they made it or fixed it.

Each of these channels grew on the backs of very talented, hardworking folks who understand their audience. Getting to a 100,000 subscriber mark is impressive for anyone, but both CarThrottle and Donut achieved millions of subscribers.

In Donut's case, the business was sold off. And as is so often the case to private equity. To be exact, Recurrent Ventures took over and as the name suggests, it is backed by private equity, a fact confirmed by a visit to the company's Crunchbase entry. Recurrent also owns "Popular Science, The Drive, Domino, MEL, Outdoor Life, Field & Stream, Car Bibles, SAVEUR, Futurism and Task & Purpose." (taken from their self-written blurb at Crunchbase.

These companies bring bunch of overpaid – well, paid but whatever it is they're doing, they're paid too much – management types, cut budgets and increase targets for the sake of shareholder value.

They think because they own a number of properties, there will be "synergy" which almost never means anything but cutbacks, layoffs and redundancies. Naturally the amount of work left is exactly the same or higher, so fewer people are left doing more work.

Plenty of sites have suffered from this kind of post-acquisition trouble, such as Vice and another of Recurrent's purchases, The Drive. The latter's YouTube channel is a ghost town compared to its past glories. The old videos continue to draw viewers but new videos don't have the draw (nothing to do with the valiant hosts, of course – it's hard to come back after years away).

Social media monitoring site SocialBlade shows subscribers as flat for years and a recent, small recovery in views since its return from effective hiatus of nearly four years.

Another type of video has become a thing in all this drama – the What happened to...? video. The Drive has one explaining its two year hiatus. PE Ponytail types feature heavily.

The ponytails tell the people who built their channels how to produce the kind of content the channel's viewers like and insist they don't need that much money to get those kinds of views. And then the views drop, they get mad, tell the presenters to work harder/better/faster. And then wonder why they leave.

CarThrottle was sold by its founder Adnan Ebrahim who had already sold part of the business to a Swiss venture capital firm. This particular firm told me in 2019 that CarThrottle was not for sale and, well, it was, because it was sold about ten weeks later.

The business was picked up by Dennis Publishing (publisher of Evo and AutoExpress) and that's when the rot started. In 2021 Crash Media Group (publishers of motorsport site crash.net) bought the site and channel from Dennis and subsequently cut budgets, at least as far as I can tell from the exodus followed.

Kersten, Joy, Smales and Klinkenberg saw the channel through the difficult days of the pandemic and associated lockdowns and still produced some great stuff.

Neither buyer had any experience in the kind of content CarThrottle made, or understood the vision. Not all automotive content is created equal. See also The Drive, who were owned by Time Inc. and then someone worse, neither of whom understood why it even existed.

Automotive media is always in a state of flux. I worked for Carsguide as a freelancer for ten years and during that time it had three different owners. It's now on its fourth since about 2015.

During my much briefer time at WhichCar/Wheels it had two owners. It's now on its third since 2021, with the magazine properties (Wheels and the defunct Motor) going one way and the website another.

It has become clear over the past few years that the types of channel that survive are those dominated by their creators. This should sound familiar: Top Gear and then The Grand Tour were both left largely to their creators to own and run and were mostly great television.

Which is why that second group of channels will grow and proliferate. Mighty Car Mods, Tavarish, AutoAlex and a whole host of others all operate under the control of their founders. They're fun. They know their audience. They understand the medium. They run the numbers.

And they often support each other and the people and businesses that support them. Which is an interesting point I've made quite by accident.

By and large, the people who write about cars quite like each other and aren't all that bothered by the corporate games that go on above them. We lend each other gear on launches, chat to each other about what's going on and test our theories about cars on each other.

In my early days I helped "competing" journalists shoot video on my gear because I was the only one turning up with anything half-decent.

We share cars on launches and therefore trust each other with our lives in often strange and unfamiliar locations.

If we could, we'd all (mostly) work together as one big happy family. I would love to do it full-time because these people are my friends and are some of the firmest and best friends I've ever had.

And that's because we're all car people from different socio-economic backgrounds, faiths (or no faith) and different countries. And some of them are even ladies. Fancy that!

Interestingly we've seen the start of the kind of fragmentation I'm talking about happening here in Australia. Former CarAdvice and then Carsguide stalwart Matt Campbell was the victim of a new owner redundancy binge at the latter site. So he went and started his own channel.

I can tell you from personal experience, this is no easy thing in a crowded market and requires an enormous amount of work, discipline and mental strength because folks on the internet aren't always very nice to deal with.

Matt already had over a decade of experience deep in the guts of what makes a successful YouTube channel tick and had spent a good chunk of the pandemic looking at ways to cost-effectively produce quality video reviews.

His channel, The Right Car?, has grown rapidly without support from sponsors or a well-funded parent company. He's closing in on 10m views in under two years from a standing start.

He's generating more than half the monthly views of his previous employer without all the budgets and staff. That's no sledge on the fine folks at Carsguide, the point is that effective targeting by people who really understand the audience can make stuff happen. He has a clear vision, you know exactly what you're going to get in every video and he delivers.

People he's worked with for years have lent a helping hand to get him on his way, but he's largely a one-man band, freelancing at CarExpert and News Motoring while he builds the channel.

Another CarAdvice personality, CarExpert's Paul Maric basically runs the YouTube channel and does largely the same thing. You know he's thorough, knowledgable and personable. The channel is huge and both supports and is supported by the carexpert.com.au

In the case of CarThrottle, Donut and even Overdrive, the ponytails think they understand the audience but they just don't. They also think that because videos look cheap and cheerful that there is cost-cutting to be had while not a for moment understanding there's a point to them looking a certain way.

The real issue here is that you can't really manage creativity. The people who make good automotive videos do it on a mix of instinct and data. They know what works.

A lot of the stuff I've done over the years at Carsguide and Whichcar is to a formula that folks expect when they're looking at a new RAV4 or CX-5 but the formula is different for a Lotus Elise or a £1500 banger. And I'd argue that there's no formula for those cars, it's about emotion, personality and fun. You just have to trust your instincts.

And some people have the worst instincts imaginable. When "shareholder value" becomes the driving force of a creative business, things more of than not go completely disastrously. The fact that these disasters keep happening is no mystery – I've already said, these people attach themselves to a success and bleed it dry.

So while I've already blamed TV people for killing shows like Top Gear, you can blame almost the same kind of person for almost killing automotive YouTube.

Next week is the third and final part of this epic look at how the car show died and how it doesn't need to be this way. But courage is in short supply...