“What Happened To The Car Throttle Community?” FINALLY ANSWERED

12 Sep 2017

Hello CTzens! For those who don’t know me, my name is Adnan and I’m the founder and CEO of Car Throttle. If you don’t know much about Car Throttle, delete your account immediately. I’m just kidding. We run the largest social car communities including, yes you guessed it, Car Throttle, the long-running and hilarious Car Memes, and our new glossy motorsport community WTF1.

I’ve recently become aware of a few posts (read: many posts) asking the same question over and over again: where the heck are the Car Throttle staff and why the heck aren’t they paying attention to us?

To answer both questions succinctly: here we are (see potato photo), and we are paying attention to you, but in ways you may not see!

Allow me to explain.

In 2016, we decided to focus our efforts on building what we now call our ‘cross-platform’ media company. Without the jargon, we realised that the bulk of our viewers were coming from platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, given that (un)fortunately they provide for far better content consumption environments. Think about it, how many times do you refresh your social media apps every day? For me, it goes well into three figures. Whilst I firstly need to get a life, it’s also a sign of the times that media companies need to talk to users where they spend most of their time.

So this meant spending more hours crafting YouTube videos that we still distribute for free, more time creating great Facebook videos that we both shoot and curate, and more time serving you news on Instagram, so you’re the biggest ‘know-it-all’ in your petrolhead friend circle.

Given our finite resources in both money and staff time, what that meant was less time spent serving the thousands of users that live here, and spending slightly more time serving the hundreds of millions of users that live out there, in the wild west world of social media. Last month we served 375 million video views, making us the largest automotive social publisher!

That’s not to say we value you CTzens less. Since you asked for more staff interaction, our Editor and writers have been trying to reply to more comments on news posts. Our social team has been in touch with many of you regarding submitted videos, and I have continued to communicate with key moderators, checking to see that the tone we originally set is being adhered to.

It goes without saying that Car Throttle would be nothing without its loyal base of CTzens, and it’s still amazing to see so many daily posts in this part of the site. Whilst our custom-built platform and the suite of apps we built on iOS and Android are no longer top priorities, we will continue to do all we can to squash bugs and remove any toxic behaviour. Our Senior Developer, JJ, spent a lot of time last week fighting inappropriate spam accounts in a bid to save your user experience. This is just one example of things you don’t see happening behind-the-scenes.

So, what’s coming next?

We’re going to continue to involve you in the development of Car Throttle; a great example being ‘The World’s Smartest Petrolhead’ competition that we ran last month with a $1000 cash prize. This competition was created with our diehard fans in mind, and there will be an extremely interesting outcome from the competition we’ll be sure to share when the time is right.

We’re continuing to invest in quality original content on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, as well as live products like Facebook Live and Instagram Stories. Get ready for a new season of 2 Guys 1 Car, a new project series, and more funny and informative shorter-form videos across the board.

The Car Throttle Shop continues to take on a life of its own, seeing lots of regular orders from users who want cool petrolhead products, but also important items in the world of car care and now even car parts! We’re working with more brands who want to distribute their products to our community.

I’m literally scratching the surface here. But I wanted you to know that after seven years running Car Throttle full-time, I’m still here. We’re not ‘dead’, the staff haven’t ‘disappeared’, and our attention hasn’t diminished. We’re just spending time on things you may not see on the dot com site.

I’m happy to answer questions in the comments. I’m heading to an event now with Ethan (ffs) but will be back online later this evening to jump in and tell you nearly everything you’ve wanted to know.

Peace and love.

Adnan

Comments

You guys have been slackin’. Yep. That’s a paddlin’.

The site just feels…..empty now. With more focus on YouTube, which is a slowly dying platform in-it-of-itself, I can’t help but feel we’re kind of shoved on the backburner, taking into consideration what happens behind the scenes, and the various other point Adnan had made.

I understand the necessity to expand, my boss has been expanding his business and sending me around ever since I started working a few years back, I know how it feels. However, CarThrottle is essentially MemeThrottle. Instagram and facebook are pretty much meme-havens and the same sort of applies to the .com site as well. The diversification in content just vanished, as more of the once-dedicated users, such as myself, began to lose interest in creating content for the masses, but there are still some who haven’t lost the will to keep providing, so I commend those who do with a hat over the heart. But it doesn’t excuse the large portion of content just being memes, and not much else, if we’re being a bit fair.

I just…I want to know where the future lies for CarThrottle. As a long time member and once-avid content creator, I want to return to that part of myself with clarity, not continue to look down a hallway filled with smoke and mirrors, wondering if we’ll fall beneath this state of limbo, or truly band together and make a final push back to the bustling-with-life community we once were. I hope the site becomes bigger again.