Want More Epic Car Content? Introducing Car Throttle's New Discuss Platform

It’s hard not to feel frustrated with the car industry. I’ve been running Car Throttle for five years now (damn) and in that period of time, I’ve seen people come and go, blogs gain momentum then stall, publishing houses fight to hold on for the scraps of the magazine market and new media upstarts battle to fight their way in.

We’ve been blessed, but have also seen some tough times. Only 18 months ago we had 100,000 unique visitors per month, a few Facebook fans knocking around and a YouTube channel struggling to see the light of day. Fast forward to the present day and we’re touching 3,000,000 unique visitors per month and now have one of the most popular automotive YouTube channels in the world. It’s been quite a journey.

But automotive media hasn’t moved much. There’ve been new channels, a proliferation of social media voices (great to see, of course), and a couple of website refreshes from the established titles. But not much in the way of innovation. As a team, we look around and see so much change happening in tech media, entertainment, gaming and fashion, but hardly anything happening in autos.

It’s time for a change.

Media has shifted towards a two-way conversation, between editors and users. Here on Car Throttle, we now get 15,000 comments per month and 160,000 comment votes. That’s a massive number of people who love interacting with other petrolheads. And you also love uploading memes and cars in the CT Garage. Sometimes your memes break news faster than we could ever dream of!

So why should you be constrained to posting Impact font-ridden memes (we love them really)? Well, you shouldn’t. Introducing Discuss…

What exactly is Discuss?

Simply put, it’s an area where you can submit content. Seen an awesome car video on YouTube that you want to share with your fellow gearhead brethren? Post it on Discuss. Got a question you want to ask the community? Post it on Discuss. Have a really saucy image of you standing in front of your whip? Probably keep that one to yourself.

We’ve also given this Discuss v1 a single feed layout, which means you can scroll, scroll and keep scrolling until your thumbs bleed. You can vote on content and, of course, discuss with your fellow community members. How civilised!

Of course, in order to post you’ll need to create a Car Throttle account, but you obviously have one of those already. Right?!

What can’t I post in Discuss?

We’re pretty strict on a few things: first, no posting of personal information. Second, keep the inevitable hate speech to Facebook and Twitter - ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat. Finally, no NSFW content - 4Chan we are certainly not, and Jennifer Lawrence nudes will not be welcome here.

Other than that, this is your space. We’ll iterate and improve the platform depending on how you use it, so feel free to post as much or as little as you like.

Above all, we want your feedback. This community starts and finishes with you. The only way we grow is if we make your experience on Car Throttle the best it can possibly be. So let us know what you think below.

So, what is the future of automotive media?

That, ladies and gentleman, is the right question. The world of content is changing. We’ve got our own hunches here, and we think vertical (or niche) communities are the way forward - they’re more focused and the userbase is significantly more engaged. Discuss might look simple on the surface but it’s a building block for us, Ground Zero, and what comes next will be even more important.

Here’s to the next five years of growth. Now go Discuss!