With 1 million users, DriveTribe courts advertisers

After growing to 1 million users in the last year, DriveTribe, a content creator and platform for car enthusiasts, is starting to drive commercial deals with brands.

Just before launch last November, the company — founded by “The Grand Tour” hosts Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond — announced funding of $6.5 million (£4.9 million) from 21st Century Fox and $5.5 million (£4.1 million) in Series A funding led by Breyer Capital and Atomico.

With less pressure to make money to survive, DriveTribe has spent a year working with brands like Porsche and Sky Sports F1 in noncommercial partnerships to find the most sustainable revenue model. In January, it plans to work with four brands on a retainer-type partnership for three months, where DriveTribe will provide a number of services, like creative solutions and access to its users and influencer network. The key currency, said DriveTribe CEO Jonathan Morris, is access to behavioral data on its community in real time.

“We found that working with brands on a campaign-by-campaign basis was looking through too tight a lens,” he said. “The reasons why a video didn’t perform well on YouTube but did on Facebook were complex and unfathomable. We needed to run a series of these to understand data and user behavior in a more realistic way.”

DriveTribe sits between a publisher and a platform. The company has 45 employees, a quarter of whom work on creative solutions. It has a slim in-house content team of three people, plus a network of global contributors, some of whom are paid. Most of the content on the platform, however, is user-generated content posted to what it calls tribes, which are forums built around specific niches. There are about 30,000 tribes, ranging from the Sky Sports F1 tribe to one about dogs (and goats) in cars. Clarkson, May and Hamilton have their own tribes, as does “The Grand Tour.”

Car enthusiasts are a social bunch, as the number of other popular auto communities like Car Throttle and PistonHeads proves. Understanding how they behave — like what type of content an Audi fan views, their feelings about topical industry points such as the Tesla electric truck launch, other interests, tribes they’re part of and how they interact with others — is valuable for brands. DriveTribe said brands can use this data to inform the type of media they use and where they distribute it.

Each of the 1 million DriveTribe users engages with more than one piece of content per day on average, according to the company. In the last 28 days, DriveTribe served 1.7 billion content impressions across its own platform and social media platforms, up to 15 percent of which were on its own property, and 230 million people have had a low-level engagement — such as a share or a like — with these posts, according to Morris. Per Tubular Labs, DriveTribe had nearly 50 million video views in October on Facebook, where it has nearly 3 million followers.

Encouraging people to use a platform when they already have Facebook is a challenge, but it helps to have well-known people behind the venture as DriveTribe does. According to Morris, quizzes drive high conversion rates from Facebook to DriveTribe, like one on how much torque different cars produce that had 230 reactions. More in-depth articles on carburetors, for instance, have smaller conversion rates from Facebook but much higher levels of engagement due to a more focused audience.

Morris said DriveTribe hasn’t decided how much to charge brands for partnerships, but the fee would be “reasonably sized” because the deals’ length would be only three months. It has a big pool to fish in beyond car manufacturers; oil, tech, sports and gaming brands want to target car enthusiasts.

“[This revenue model] is the movement we’re seeing across the industry away from programmatic advertising to a more holistic brand and media approach,” Morris said.

The post With 1 million users, DriveTribe courts advertisers appeared first on Digiday.



from Digiday http://ift.tt/2zRm9LW
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2BynBQo

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Use Content Scrapers to Automate these 7 SEO Hacks

Image
Everyone is looking to get ahead when it comes to SEO. But that can be hard when your competitors are putting out content that ranks better than yours. There are a lot of reasons why their content ranks, of course. Maybe they have better domain authority  than you do, or maybe they have a larger built-in audience. That shouldn’t get you down, though. There are ways that you can use their content to your advantage. One of those ways is to use a content scraper (also known as a web scraper ) to gain insights into what they’re doing so you can do it, too. The only caveat is that you have to know how to use them correctly. Otherwise, you could be stuck with the wrong data. Here’s what to know. What is content scraping? Content scrapers are automated programs that pull data from multiple websites. Let’s say for a moment that you wanted to see what sort of titles your competitors were using on their blog posts to get the most clicks. You could visit each website individually...
Read more

What 759 Content Marketing Campaigns Can Teach You About Link Building And Organic Traffic

Image
If you want to generate more organic traffic or build links, your campaigns have to perform well. There isn’t any cut-and-dry formula for crafting successful posts or running effective marketing campaigns. There are tons of suggested formulas, tips, and tricks out there. But not all of them are worth your time or energy. And it can be hard to find formulas and elements of a campaign that are actually proven to work, based on data. Luckily, the folks at Fractl examined 759 different content marketing campaigns from 2013 to 2017 that can teach us a lot about what successful campaigns usually look like. Here’s what these 759 campaigns can teach you about link building and organic traffic. An overview of the data Fractl’s Director of Marketing, Kerry Jones , decided to gather data from 345 marketing campaigns  and share it to help marketers improve the quality and effectiveness of their content. A few years later, she tried the same tactic with data from a sample of 759 campa...
Read more

Hack Your Way to 50,000 Google Visitors with these 9 Tips

Image
There’s no single hack for getting huge traffic numbers from Google. Sorry. I wish I could tell you that if you added a very specific keyword to your site or if you optimized your images in just the right way you could net 50,000 unique views. But it just doesn’t happen that way. The reality is that you can’t rely on one technique to bring in unique visitors. You have to approach it using a combination of different strategies. Depending on your budget, some of those strategies might be out of your reach right now. That’s okay. Because over time (and yes, it does take time) anyone can hack their way to large traffic numbers. What does it take to get 50,000 new visitors? The key to getting 50,000 (or 100,000, or a million) new site visitors is to play it safe. I know what you’re thinking. Safe? It’s not something that entrepreneurs or marketers want to hear. Safe means slow. But a slow, steady, multifaceted approach to growth will always win over the quick tricks. Take a ...
Read more