The Demise of DriveTribe
Gone… but not forgotten?
Six years is how long the much publicized social media platform DriveTribe lasted in the automotive world. Despite a startup capitalization of over $12 million dollars, 10 million active daily users and 140 million monthly users the people in charge of the website could not keep it going. Even with the help of automotive royalty, Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the three most famous car guys, *IN THE WORLD*, the site could not manage to keep the doors open.
Covid, and the resulting market shortages, namely computer chips, were blamed as the culprits. Manufactures had lowered their marketing budgets and DriveTribe could not go on with the resulting revenue loss.
DriveTribe aimed not to fill a void in the automotive world, but rather carve out its own place. The site was set up in a way that just going to it and idly scrolling through post after post did not give the user the full experience. In short, nothing about DT was frivolous or passive. The people that posted to the site would often write 1,500+ word articles about particular aspects of car culture. That is what the site was designed to do
This “nerdy” approach to a social media platform is one that I have never seen a parallel to and it would lead to its eventual downfall.
It turns out that the number of people truly passionate about automotive culture, enough to spend hours every week creating content, isn’t as large as Clarkson, Hammond and May thought it would be. Ultimately, the whole thing didn’t appeal to enough people to become a mainstay of car culture. More worrying was DriveTribes seeming inability, or desire, to appeal to a mass audience outside of the UK. That sort of narrow focus works well on a YouTube channel, but it's no way to run a social media site.
And that is a pity. DriveTribe promised to be a meeting place for enthusiasts of all stripes, but it mainly catered to a UK audience. If those in charge had been willing to step out of their little box and see the benefits of embracing car culture on a wider scale, we might have a truly centralized location for all things automotive related.
With the end of DriveTribe it was back to Facebook groups and YouTube channels. Those are fairly good tools, but they are nothing like the educational and idea sharing concept that DriveTribe was. The two way, easy to follow flow of information is now gone. The most important thing DriveTribe did was to give many different writers, from all over the world, a first step into the world of automotive journalism and content creation.
For that simple reason DriveTribe will be important for years to come.
