Right before Christmas Aaron Severson (2023) warned that “the future of Ate Up With Motor is looking quite bleak.” This strikes me as a wake-up call to the automotive history field. Severson is arguably one of the best auto history writers on the web. He may also be one of the younger ones, so in a very real sense Severson represents the future of a field where many of us are getting up there in age. This is why Ate Up With Motor could be viewed as the proverbial canary in the mineshaft for the American auto history media.
Severson’s (2023) basic challenge would appear to be that he makes a living entirely as a freelancer — and during the last year “most” of his other sources of income have “dried up.” So quite understandably he seems to be focusing on writing that generates meaningful income. Unfortunately, Ate Up With Motor doesn’t do that so “it’s harder to find or justify the energy involved.”
In discussing his situation, Severson (2023) ran through a number of scenarios for boosting income from his website. For example, he didn’t think that Ate Up With Motor still has enough readership to generate adequate advertising revenue and “the prospect of creating print or e-books has been sort of a chimera that presents a variety of practical problems I don’t know how to solve.”
This sounds dire enough that perhaps the best we can hope for is that Severson finds enough new work outside the auto history field to be financially successful. I hope that those in the publishing world who have admired the quality of his research and writing will investigate whether they have ways of drawing upon his talents. Meanwhile, perhaps with some fundraising Ate Up With Motor can be kept online as a static archive.
That will hopefully save Severson. But what about American automotive history?
Can a solo auto history website be financially viable?
We have previously discussed the need for an auto history association to create a Substack-type service that allows writers to easily monetize their content and archive it when they stop publishing (go here). Thus far that idea has gone nowhere — which makes sense given the individualistic structure and myopic culture of the auto history field.
So perhaps it comes down to small-scale publishers displaying an advanced level of entrepreneurship. Might there be a way that an auto history writer could generate sufficient revenue from a website to make it worth their while?
The experience of writers in other fields suggests that the answer is yes. This is a golden age for reader-supported websites. A key factor has been the development of technologies that allow writers with minimal expertise or upfront capital to put in place a partial or full paywall and charge a subscription.
I am not aware of a U.S. auto history writer who has tried to make a serious living with a reader-supported website. This surprises me because there would appear to be a market for it. In addition, one big advantage auto history writers possess is that their content doesn’t tend to grow obsolete. An experienced writer like Severson possesses a valuable commodity — he has a large and fairly comprehensive body of work that should continue to be compelling even if he never wrote another story. The only question is how to best monetize it.
Also see ‘What would happen to auto history media if they outlawed clickbait?’
The most popular way to do so in the automotive media has been through ads. The challenge with that approach is generating a high enough readership. My sense is that the best way to do so is to post a steady flow of content.
That content doesn’t necessarily have to be new. Curbside Classic and Mac’s Motor City Garage are among the auto history websites that frequently repost older stories on their front pages (and, unlike Indie Auto, they don’t typically update or expand them). Recycling content both reduces one’s workload and generates more revenue over a longer period of time.
I suspect that if Severson did nothing more than reposted a steady flow of existing articles (and boosted them in social media) that he could rebuild his readership enough to bring in at least some ad revenue. And if he were able to put a little more time into it, he might also find ways to repackage parts of stories into smaller stand-alone pieces. He might even find that a goodly number of his readers preferred the shorter pieces.
Since Severson mentioned e-books, it may be useful to say that some writers have used websites with paywalls to generate additional income from serialized content offered at a premium to a base subscription. That could be a more financially viable alternative to publishing stand-alone e-books.
Will the auto history field invest in its future?
The world of small-scale publishing has changed dramatically since Ate Up With Motor was launched. New technologies are allowing solo writers to make a living in ways that were largely unheard of even a decade ago.
I don’t say this to imply that I think Severson could make a decent living if he would just try some new approaches with Ate Up With Motor. For one thing, it may be too late for that given his apparent financial situation. In addition, I don’t know what the future holds, e.g., a recession could very well wash out a whole bunch of writers who are currently doing okay.
Small-scale publishing is not a field for the faint-hearted. This is why I admire anyone who has had the fortitude to keep alive a website for any length of time. Even if Ate Up With Motor went offline tomorrow, Severson could justifiably feel proud about producing a huge body of high-quality automotive history.
That said, I think it is a bad sign if someone as talented and dedicated as Severson can’t make a sufficient living as an auto history writer. I wish that the field’s leading organizations had the capacity — and will — to be of support to him. For example, if he decided to set up a paywall with a subscription requirement, it would be a nice gesture for groups such as the Society of Automotive Historians and the Antique Automobile Club of America to send out a fundraising letter on his behalf to their respective memberships.
That’s just a brainstorm, but the key point is that the field needs to get better at investing in its future. I can think of few things more important than investing in top-quality younger writers.
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RE:SOURCES
- Severson, Aaron; 2023. “Status Report.” Ate Up With Motor. Posted Dec. 23.
“…automotive history is a useful lens through which to examine and understand the forces that have shaped the modern world.”
I’ve tried to understand my own obsession with automotive history and Severson’s condensed definition of automotive history gets to the core of my own interest in knowing more about something that the vast majority of earth’s population takes completely for granted. Do motorized vehicles play a larger role in our march through industrial and technology advances than communication, medical or sociological creation? Probably not. But without that history we would all be living very different lives.
Discovering that history has shown me a completely different aspect of something this old gearhead, a guy who hung with the cruisers and street racers in my hometown, could never imagine.
Losing that history became a concern for me probably 10-15 years ago. It probably had a lot to do with getting old, becoming nostalgic for those early experiences in my own life and listening to stories from people not nearly as attached to mechanical devices as me. Could that history completely disappear?
For me, that’s a difficult realization and I’ve campaigned over the years to put automotive history at the forefront of enthusiast and historical organizations. I’ve made a point of joining a myriad of clubs, associations and groups dedicated to all manner of automotive interests to see where historical preservation falls in the list of priorities for those enthusiast gatherings.
For the most part preservation is given short shrift. The social aspects of belonging remains the primary reason members join these groups. Events, conferences, showing vehicles for recognition, or collecting (hoarding?) play a much bigger role than any concern about the future preservation of knowledge gained.
Yes, there are the libraries, the collections, the museums and any number of private accumulations that are closely held, difficult to access unless you are a member or subscriber that can travel, pay a fee or “know someone who knows someone”.
Should there be a cooperative effort to bring the collective groups and organizations together to tackle this preservation? Yes, of course.
But territorial issues, ego, and an unwillingness to share information stands firmly in the center of any effort to even begin the process. Preservation will not be easy and it will take a major effort from not only the enthusiast organizations, but people like Aaron Severson and Steve Salmi who aren’t in it for the money or glory.
Work is drying up because the entire publishing industry is in crisis. Advertising revenue has fallen of a cliff with mass redundancies being regularly announced and the less obvious cutting of freelance jobs. AI allows one person to generate a huge amount of barely edited filler. For genuine content creators there is another dilemma. How many people will support more than a handful of sites? I still subscribe to two car magazines but will I bother/afford subs to others? Maybe a return to publishing is the way forward. Fiction has fought back, why not motoring?
John, I agree that the entire industry is in crisis. However, my impression is that small-scale “newsletters” (such as through Substack) have been experiencing a bit of a boomlet — which is good because it is absorbing some of the otherwise out-of-work writers. My guess is that there will be a bust once a recession hits and we’ll see where this niche levels out.
When you say “publishing” I assume you mean of books? If yes, the challenge there is one must take a much bigger gamble of putting a bunch of time into a work with the very real possibility that it doesn’t generate an adequate return.
It’s just a bad time to be a writer. The general attitude seems to be that content should be free. That said, some people are still managing to monetize their writing. It would appear to take an increasing amount of entrepreneurial skills, which not everyone possesses.