Why are so many car YouTubers quitting?

Where people once got their car news, reviews, and opinions from a few recognizable media empires, today, that’s all changing. An explosion of YouTube channels has been seeing momentum as brands that aren’t just covering car culture but defining it. 

This has caused no shortage of consternation for those older, established brands, but lately, even upstart car YouTube channels have had troubles. They’re suffering through a phenomenon playing out across countless “Why I Quit” videos that have collectively served up more beef than the combined discographies of Drake and Kendrick Lamar. 

Many of the world’s most popular creators are fleeing the channels they helped make famous. They’re going solo, often not long after those former channels received high-dollar acquisitions. According to endless ponderings and pontifications from YouTubers, influencers, and commenters, profit-minded venture capitalists are sucking the life out of some of the internet’s most popular channels. 

Private equity certainly has been blamed for destroying some of our most beloved things over the years, from RadioShack to Toys R Us, but is there something special afoot here in the world of automotive media? Or is this just a new chord added to a familiar and unpleasant tune?

Early momentum

Much of the talk lately has been about Donut Media, a YouTube channel launched by Matt Levin in 2015 that’s been shedding talent left and right. Boasting nearly 9 million subscribers, Donut has had numerous one-off viral videos over the years, but its ongoing series “Up to Speed,” hosted by James Pumphrey, has been a consistent hit. Donut Media was acquired by private equity firm Recurrent Ventures in 2021. 

But this trend, such as it is, reaches far beyond that one channel. It’s a little tricky to say exactly when this all kicked off, but according to Tiernan A.I., former technical producer at Donut, the canary in the coal mine was Alex Kersten. 

Kersten was a major contributor at Car Throttle, an automotive website that launched in 2009 and, since kicking off its YouTube channel in 2011, has grown to over 3 million subscribers.

But Kersten left the site back in 2022, after a decade there, to launch his own YouTube channel, Autoalex Cars. Two other popular hosts, Ethan Smale and Jack Joy, also left Car Throttle quite publicly in April of this year.

“I feel like that was kind of the first big one, where it was someone who not only left but is also publicly expressing some of the reasons why they left,” A.I. said. 

Kersten’s departure came three years after Car Throttle was acquired by Dennis Publishing, which, at the time, also owned major British motoring publications Auto Express and Evo. In 2023, Car Throttle was acquired again, this time by Crash Media Group. 

“Then there’s sort of like this slow percolation until you get the situation at Hoonigan,” A.I. said. Hoonigan, the brand made famous by Ken Block, was acquired by aftermarket wheel company Wheel Pros in 2021, itself backed by the private equity group Clearlake Capital. Two years later, after pruning away much of the enthusiast-minded content that formerly defined Hoonigan, Wheel Pros rebranded itself as Hoonigan. 

“I think a lot of us were sort of appalled by that,” A.I. said. 

If there was a key moment in this evolving landscape, it was the appointment of Vance Johnston as president of Hoonigan. That announcement, featuring Johnston wearing a shirt and tie, was seen by many as being emblematic of Hoonigan truly losing touch with its audience. The news was shared to the /r/Hoonigan subreddit in a thread sarcastically calling Johnston “a true Hoonigan.” 

The top-voted comment reads: “The only tyres hes slaying is office seat wheels on carpet.”

The knee-jerk treatment of Johnston by the internet at large was vastly unfair (enthusiasts wear uniforms of all sorts), but by the same token, Hoonigan’s PR team clearly could have read the room a little better before signing off on that release. (Hoonigan did not respond to a request for comment.)

Donut departures

While there have been dozens of departures at many brands in the time since, few have set tongues wagging like the very public departures of Jeremiah Burton and Zach Jobe from Donut Media. 

In June, the pair announced their departure with a YouTube video that launched their new channel, BigTime, while simultaneously throwing shade at Recurrent Ventures, the private equity firm that acquired Donut Media back in late 2021. 

Burton and Jobe expressed frustration about how the creative process changed, from experimenting and failing fast to constantly having to make hits. “We just got to where we were trying to make videos that we knew would do well,” Burton said in the video. “Instead of making videos that we just wanted to do. And when you have to convince people who are paying for it to do the videos you want to do, it gets old fast,” Jobe said.

Though perhaps the most public, those were far from the only departures, following that of Jesse Wood, the brand’s CCO, who left in February after eight years at Donut. 

“The early people who were there eight or nine years ago, probably the only one left is James Pumphrey,” A.I. said. 

Since I last spoke with A.I., Pumphrey confirmed months of speculation by bowing out of Donut. Pumphrey issued a lengthy video, which includes the usual explanations and well-wishings to those who remain, before introducing his new brand, Speeed, launched with Wood. 

A.I. left Donut in January, putting his own video on YouTube last month with his take on what’s happening in automotive media. Even automotive creator heavyweight Doug DeMuro, who has nearly 5 million subscribers on his automotive channel, has weighed in.

To address all the angst, Donut Media’s new editor-in-chief, Nolan Sykes, and creative director Max Maddox hosted a Reddit AMA to discuss the extensive changes, promising a stubborn commitment to the brand. “I am bullheaded about sticking to the tenets that made Donut successful in the first place,” Sykes said. “At the end of the day I want everything to be funny, informative and entertaining. I also want to go fast.”

When approached for a comment, Donut cofounder and former CEO Matt Levin said, “I’ve had the privilege of working with all these brilliant, creative folks, and it’s wonderful to see them all growing into the next phase of their careers. I’m loving what Jeremiah and Zach are doing on Big Time, I’m super excited to see what James and Jesse have cooked up with Speeed, and of course I’m thrilled to see Nolan and Max finally get their chance to step into the spotlight and usher in a new era of Donut. As a fan of all of them, I’ve got three times as many videos to watch.”

Other perspectives

Donut isn’t the only automotive property owned by Recurrent Ventures. It also acquired The Drive, which launched with a splash as part of Time Inc. in 2015, along with an extensive portfolio of non-automotive media brands like Bob Vila and Popular Science. 

It’s the state of Donut under the brand’s leadership that has raised the most ire among fans, many of whom claim they’ll never watch another of the channel’s videos now that their favorite hosts have departed. Despite those protests, the Donut YouTube channel currently stands at 8.8 million subscribers, up from the roughly 5 million subscribers the brand had when it was acquired by Recurrent Ventures. 

Mike Spinelli, a former VP of content at Recurrent Ventures and current head of content at Motorsport Network, says that these new media brands have a lot to learn about managing talent. 

“In TV and movies, talent is everything,” he said, where contract renegotiations are commonplace. “But I don’t know whether these sort of kinds of media companies we’re talking about really understand or are used to dealing with talent in that way.”

Claims of pressure and interference are a common refrain by anyone who’s ever worked for a brand owned by private equity. Alanis King has. King, now editor-at-large for Motorsport Network (owned by GMF Capital), was previously an editor at Jalopnik when it was acquired by Great Hill Partners. King made a remarkably balanced video detailing her perspective on the current situation in automotive media.

“It’s not possible, really, ever, to grow at the rates that investment firms want,” King said. “The people creating stuff say, ‘Hey, that’s not possible.’ The people funding the stuff say, ‘We don’t really care. Do more.’ And you just end up with this conflict of ideas and expectations.”

This nonstop pressure also contributes to automotive media’s notable lack of diversity. When there’s always pressure to perform, there’s less time to groom new talent or perspectives. 

King, who cohosted the Donut Racing Show podcast with Elizabeth Blackstock, US editor at Planet F1, constantly found herself defending the podcast’s existence: “You have two female hosts on this show. It doesn’t do as well as the main show that’s been around a lot longer, but you have voices here that you don’t have on camera in a lot of other areas of your business. That’s a big deal,” King said.

Donut Racing Show was canceled in 2023 after one year.

The bigger picture

King believes there is a bigger movement at play. “I do think it’s a broader trend because we’ve seen so many people leave big platforms to start their own thing and be pretty successful. I think it will continue happening elsewhere,” she said. “It’s just one of those things where you see other people being successful, and you go, ‘I can do that too.’” 

But not everybody can. YouTube paid out an astonishing $70 billion to creators in the past three years. However, it has 113.9 million active channels, according to Global Media Insight. That works out to roughly $200 per creator per year if you portion it out evenly — but of course, it’s the top channels earning the vast majority of that revenue.

Even those who find true success may be a little less free than they’d hoped, trading one corporate devil in a suit for another more nebulous one: the algorithm. 

Full-time YouTubers love to complain about how YouTube’s mysterious algo is constantly keeping them down, an ever-evolving set of largely unpublished rules and word-of-mouth guidelines any creator must follow, lest they be deranked. 

Ever wonder why so many videos have big pictures of people making shocked expressions? YouTube Face is a thing, proven to drive higher engagement. There’s also pressure to make videos at least eight minutes long, the minimum length for a mid-roll ad.

There’s pressure to constantly grow, too. Hot channels get promoted, while anything that plateaus will struggle. “The good thing about YouTube is you can do it at any level. The problem is, you kind of always have to move forward, or else you fall,” Spinelli said. “I wish there were more opportunities for YouTubers to do whatever content they want, but the reality of getting surfaced to an audience is that you have to serve the algorithm to a certain extent.”

There are endless rules written lightly on the shifting sands of the YouTube platform, and it’s now up to those creators to figure it out themselves. 

To A.I., dealing with the pressures and whims of a platform is preferable. “Every decision that I make is not because I’m at the mercy of an algorithm. It’s because I’m at the mercy of an audience, and that’s not really a new phenomenon,” he said.

But it comes with additional pressures. “Before I left, I didn’t realize how much stuff I didn’t know. I think, honestly, I was a bit arrogant about it,” A.I. said. “And so now I’m running two YouTube channels [Overdrive and AutoTea] where I’m pretty much doing everything.” 

It’s fun to hate on private equity and venture capital, but being part of a larger enterprise has benefits, like dedicated SEO experts, established sales teams, and photographers who’ve been briefed on the ins and outs of perfect YouTube Face. 

Spinelli believes it’s time for equity firms to recalibrate these relationships. “I think there’s an opportunity for larger media companies to be able to help creators do the things that they don’t want to do, or that aren’t creative,” he said. “The sales side, the business side, but then leave them to be able to create the kind of content they want to create.”

Too often, it doesn’t happen that way. “If they are trying to conform the channel to their existing business model, it’s not going to end well for either,” he said.

Pointing fingers

At the end of the day, is there truly something going on? Yes, there’s clearly momentum here, but the causes are nothing new, and pointing the finger at investment firms is missing the bigger picture. 

Simply put, these channels are maturing. When brands get as big as Donut or Hoonigan, they almost always evolve. Whether they sell out or simply ossify into their own corporate structures, the net result will be similar: more pressure to do better than last week. With or without equity investment, this cycle is inevitable.

It also comes down to ownership stakes. Many of those departure videos call out a lack of payouts during acquisitions of the brands they helped to grow. That they didn’t get a piece of the pie is not the fault of private equity; it’s the fault of the channel creators. 

Lately, these departures seem to be less about struggling against corporate oppression and more about peer pressure. Whenever you’re in a frustrating situation professionally, if you see a friend or colleague pull the proverbial rip cord and go off to do something different, it’s increasingly tempting to deploy your own parachute. 

Not all will have soft landings. The creator economy can only support so many. But in a new age of media driven by individual personality and unconstrained voice, it’s increasingly clear that traditional investment arrangements and the expectations they bring are past due for some evolution.