Cars used to be incredibly big business for media. Car sections, car ads, and, once upon a time, car classifieds, were a major revenue stream for pretty much everyone, simply because cars were (and are) pretty much the biggest ticket consumer purchase outside houses. From the turn of the century, car advertising was regularly one of, if not the, biggest category of spend, and only a decade ago, it was still accounting for more than 1 in 10 dollars – more than $50bn – spent on advertising worldwide.
But, as with many a once-mighty media sector, the digital era has, (at least recently) not been quite so kind.
One of the highest profile attempts to build a digital media business around cars was the UK-based DriveTribe, the theoretically community and social media-based startup launched in 2016 by the three stars of BBC TV’s Top Gear, who at the time had jumped ship to a new, hugely lucrative, Amazon Prime show. Pitched as a global “YouPorn about cars”, DriveTribe managed to burn through some £30mn to bring in only £4mn revenue without, it seems, creating much of an audience in the UK, let alone internationally. It closed down in 2022.
But, while DriveTribe may have been a hubristic story of mismanagement and ill-thought-out strategy, it was also, in hindsight, a spectacularly bad time to launch a car focused, ads-funded media business.
The fact is that structural changes have made car-focused media a much less lucrative place to be for a variety of reasons. There has, over the past decade, simply been a decline in the relative importance and spend by the car industry on advertising. According to WARC’s figures, automotive advertising fell from that more than a 10%, $57bn share of the global ad market in 2016, to only slightly more than 4% and $37bn in 2023.
Along with that absolute decline, advertising around cars has also moved away from traditional media and publishing. For instance, WARC figures suggest that less than 5% of US automotive ad spend went on publishing in 2022, down from 15% in 2016, equating to a drop from around $8bn to just $2bn in little more than half a decade.
What’s left of the much smaller, though not insignificant, spend is going to pure-play internet and premium video. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a marketing opportunity built around motion, a big chunk of online spend is going to digital platforms with video at their core, so that means TV and streaming services remain strong, while image-centric social platforms such as Instagram pull in big chunks of the social spend.
It turns out that publishing aimed at bringing in ads from the car industry is competing for a very small slice of a pie that is itself a lot smaller than it used to be.
All that may help explain the mixed picture for those media brands still targeting audiences which view cars as more than just a transportation necessity. Amid the changing ad environment, the nature of car focused media has changed too, with older brands adapting and newer ones springing up too. But few seemingly doing as well as car culture media once did.
There are long-standing car magazines such as Motortrend in the US (founded in 1949) and Top Gear in the UK, owned respectively by broadcast giants Warner Brothers and the BBC (though the latter is published by Immediate Media under license). MotorTrend’s most recent circulation numbers put it at somewhere over 500k for its quarterly editions, while Top Gear posted a circulation of 76,000 last year. Their traffic numbers are respectable, 14mn and just shy of 5mn monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb. But nothing much to talk about.
There’s also Motor Authority, founded in 2006 and focused on high-end models, which is owned by specialist media business Internet Brands, owner of sites such as WebMD. And, of course, sites built around selling cars, such as Autotrader and CarsandBids use content to boost their own marketplaces.
There are also newer web-focused brands formed amid the digital media boom of the past couple of decades that have pitched themselves around car culture aimed at a more modern audience.
There’s The Drive, launched by Time Inc in 2015 and bought for an undisclosed sum by media focused private equity firm Flash in 2018. And there’s Jaloponik, owned by G/O Media, the current incarnation of Gizmodo Media which has since sold off both Gizmodo and The Onion, which provided the G and O in its name. The company has recently talked about its hopes for contextual advertising, which might make a site like Jaloponik one of its more promising properties. Then again, there is every chance that all of G/O’s properties might be up for sale in the near future.
As one car media insider puts it: “Even well-established sites with millions of readers are struggling to generate revenue. Especially if they are supposed to be doing that for shareholders. As across the media landscape, teams have been gutted and freelance budgets slashed. Although not everywhere has made the same dramatic mistakes as CNET’s attempt to replace its automotive team with AI, layoffs are far more frequent than opportunities.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about automotive media is how, these days, it looks very much like the rest of the specialist media. Where once car advertising was a huge business for everyone, simply because of the sums spent on advertising by the industry, now it’s another niche, where brands can build audiences, but are still struggling to compete for advertising dollars with digital channels. If anything, it seems as if some of the challenges are worse simply because car ads are less suited to web publishing than, say, a snazzy ad on a video native platform such as Instagram or TikTok, or, indeed, TV.
There is potentially, however, an opportunity yet to be fully realised. The car industry’s declining ad spend is complicated by the shift to electric vehicles. Indeed, it is Tesla’s insistence that it doesn’t spend on paid media that is likely partly behind the wider industry’s declining share of advertising.
Currently, interest in electric vehicles remains well behind its petrol equivalents. “Despite the industry’s (sometimes faltering) attempt to transform itself and many manufacturers committing to wholly or significantly EV futures, interest in electric vehicles remains niche,” says the industry insider. “Car hobbyists and enthusiasts are often there, first and foremost, about cars like their own and the majority of the vehicles on roads are still internal combustion engines.”
That is, eventually, going to change.
The format will shift away from media brands to search, social but everything else isn’t going into reverse. But the car industry’s need to sell a new and less familiar set of products is likely to be an upward pressure on the whole market. Targeting drivers may never again be a license to print money, but it’s probably got some mileage in it yet.
