Clarkson’s DriveTribe Loses £12.5Million In First Two Years Of Business
The social media network DriveTribe started by Clarkson, Hammond and May has reportedly had a hard first couple of years in business after its been shown that overall, the business has lost £12.5million in admin costs.
Accounts filed this week have shown that in the first year of trading, DriveTribe lost £4.2million, and in its second year £8.3million. Very large numbers for a company that was set up with huge personalities behind it. Clarkson, Hammond and May each post to DriveTribe periodically and promote their ‘tribes’ on their social media to their millions of followers.
However, despite this, reviews of DriveTribe have been mixed with many users not understanding its purpose and retiring to other media outlets. Even the big UK names in the writing scene such as Henry Catchpole and Jethro Bovingdon have left DriveTribe and moved onto other projects with other companies. Now the site is mostly community based with a few freelance writers still pushing out the largely shared content.
This is however something people have been complaining about. Unknown writers aren’t getting the views they are expecting, and therefore are turning to the more traditional way of sharing content on sites such as Facebook and YouTube.
Do you use DriveTribe? Do you post or just read their stuff? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
I checked it out for a while. I just found it too dense and convoluted. It seemed like it was trying to be all things to all petrolheads which, though noble, is likely unsustainable… as this balance sheet would suggest. You can get all the user generated content you want on the internets. If you aren’t going to have the personalities we want to hear from as exclusives to your site then I don’t see the appeal.