for a brief window a few years ago, I was given EVs to review by various car makers back when EVs were weird and new, so they figured giving them to tech nerds was a good approach (now they want to give them to tiktok influencers) - I liked it, I would do it again, I wonder if a car review blog in 2026 is still a viable thing
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I also don't know if this is because I'm 42 years old, had the joy of life sucked out of me and no longer have the beginners naivety I did in my 20s and early 30s - or if the internet publishing ecosystem is actually broken. Probably a bit of both.
@decryption It is absolutely a bit of both.
You'd be entering a market that is already saturated with existing players and the focus is video.
I, like you, wish it wasn't. But really you're never going to get anywhere focusing on words and photos.
@MattHatton even if I did it for the love of the game, unless you have a healthy audience reading, nobody's gonna give you cars to borrow, even dealerships won't unless there's something in it for them - if I start paying to rent/borrow cars it gets expensive and there's no monetisation strategy that works for this
@MattHatton @decryption plus you'd have to do that stupid fucking face every car reviewer does in the thumbnails
@decryption This is a lot of feels
@simon apparently it's a common thing with many people - you just take a lot less risks in your 40s onwards as you've got more to preserve and you realise how many shit people there are out there
@decryption @simon I wonder if it is more environmental now? In my forties I started a pty ltd company and was working for myself. Two kids at school and mortgaged to the hilt! That decision led me to lots of incredible projects that I would never have come across otherwise. My pty ltd company will cease trading in October after 30 years! I have to add a caveat that while there were concerns back then, the world feels a magnitude scarier now, and I wonder whether I would give up a secure job so easily!
@decryption no doubt. sucks to have the joy sucked out though
@decryption Seems to be. See Car Sauce, Car Expert, Driving Enthusiast. Maybe the anti-Christ himself, Auto Expert. There is Redriven for the second hand market. All Aussie.
@tubsta aren't those all YouTube channels?
@decryption They are, but they run blogs on vehicles, YouTube is just another mechanism to get people in that are stuck in that ecosystem. The reviews are long on YouTube so no good for space cadet, tiktokers ...
@tubsta i guess the written reviews are for SEO for their businesses (they've all got some sort of car buying service attached) - I just want to write them, no videos
@decryption outside of tiktok bullshit (who can go through all the features of a car in under a few minutes?) your best bet is YT, and that’s hard if you haven’t been doing it consistently for like 5+ years already.
@georgeharito yeah seems like if you arent' on YT car makers don't want to know you, I don't even think people would read a 2000-ish word review of a car with 100+ photos. The LLMs will though, and will regurgitate what I wrote and whoever sends the prompt will never click the link to read the full review
@decryption if you’re just starting out, it’s already a race to the bottom.
Doug Demuro recently did a video about the car review scene, might be worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet
@georgeharito I'd like to think there's a niche for people like me, but it may be a niche too small to bother with
@decryption not if you’re just going to tell the truth