DriveTribe is a

social networking platform A social networking service or SNS (sometimes called a social networking site) is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, act ...

founded as an online hub for auto enthusiast content and digital socialising. Founded by presenters

Jeremy Clarkson Jeremy Charles Robert Clarkson (born 11 April 1960) is an English broadcaster, journalist, game show host and writer who specialises in Driving, motoring. He is best known for the motoring programmes ''Top Gear (2002 TV series), Top Gear'' an ...

James May James Daniel May (born 16 January 1963) is an English television presenter and journalist. He is best known as a co-presenter of the motoring programme ''Top Gear (2002 TV series), Top Gear'' alongside Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond from ...

and

Richard Hammond Richard Mark Hammond (born 19 December 1969) is an English journalist, television presenter, mechanic, and writer. He is best known for co-hosting the BBC Two motoring programme ''Top Gear'' from 2002 until 2015 with Jeremy Clarkson and Jame ...

alongside entrepreneur

Ernesto Schmitt Ernesto Gottfried Schmitt (born August 1971) is an Americans, American-born entrepreneur, serial entrepreneur and investor. He is co-founder of The Craftory, a $600m VC fund, venture capital fund for cause-driven Challenger brand, challenger bra ...

, the platform was characterised by their use of themed 'tribes', which allowed users to join groups of enthusiasts with similar interests. The platform scaled rapidly, and by 2018 it had 10 million daily active users and 140 million monthly users across its platforms. By 2022, DriveTribe shifted to social media only. The brand continues to operate through its social media accounts, and its YouTube channel with over 2.2 million subscribers as of August 2022.

Tribes

Tribes were categorisations and themes, allowing users to find the content most relevant to their area of interest. These range from Tribes dedicated to particular makes and models, to Tribes about road trips, engineering, and even remote-controlled cars. The website launched in November 2016, under

, and

to much fanfare, with several selected tribe leaders to get things started. These early adopters started their tribes a week ahead of the full release to allow new fan-made tribes to reach maturity before the masses were allowed entry. Some Tribes were run by automotive celebrities such as Mark Webber,

Damon Hill Damon Graham Devereux Hill, (born 17 September 1960) is a British former professional racing driver from England and the 1996 Formula One World Champion. He is the son of Graham Hill, and, along with Nico Rosberg, one of two sons of a Formu ...

, and many others.

Leadership and investors

Serial tech entrepreneur

was a co-founder and the former CEO of the platform. Financing for DriveTribe came from, among others,

21st Century Fox Twenty-First Century Fox, Inc., doing business as 21st Century Fox (21CF), was an American multinational mass media corporation that was based in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It was one of the two companies formed on June 28, 2013, f ...

and

Breyer Capital James W. Breyer (born July 26, 1961) is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. B ...

, who had invested respectively $6.5 and $5.5 million in the platform.

Commercialization

In April 2018, DriveTribe announced its first commercial partnership, with German car manufacturer Audi. In June 2018, DriveTribe launched a joint partnership with JOE Media and

Renault Groupe Renault ( , , , also known as the Renault Group in English; legally Renault S.A.) is a French multinational automobile manufacturer established in 1899. The company produces a range of cars and vans, and in the past has manufactured ...

, a six-figure deal focusing on the launch of the Megane RS. Renault UK marketing director, Adam Wood, said the partnership would look to "engage a broader lifestyle market through original content production, influencer led activation and editorial support." In November 2018, the DriveTribe CEO, Jonathan Morris, described the four elements of the company's commercial model, which include content creation, distribution, and data insights. The latter of which is made possible because DriveTribe's tech stack is built on

Apache Flink Apache Flink is an open-source, unified stream-processing and batch-processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation. The core of Apache Flink is a distributed streaming data-flow engine written in Java and Scala. Flink exec ...

Data

In an article on LinkedIn, DriveTribe CSO Richard Beech said that data captured by DriveTribe user engagement had allowed the company to connect car brands to "millennials who are affluent and open-minded when it comes to electric vehicles, or mums and dads that own SUVs, but that have limited knowledge about tyres."

Discontinuation of platform

On 10 January 2022, DriveTribe announced they would be shutting down at the end of the month, citing reductions in revenue due to lower marketing budgets across the automotive industry and a global shortage of computer chips caused by the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identif ...

. Co-Founder Richard Hammond stated that they would be keeping the DriveTribe community alive through their established social media and YouTube channel. Jeremy Clarkson and James May would also be making appearances from time to time. DriveTribe and its food-related website FoodTribe shut down on 28 January 2022. The website now links to DriveTribe's established social media pages, such as their YouTube channel.

References

{{Portal, Cars Automotive websites