Today I’m talking to Doug DeMuro, one of my all-time favorite YouTubers. Doug’s channel is real simple: he reviews cars. New cars, old cars, weird cars: he drives them, pushes all the buttons, and tells you about their quirks and features, a phrase that is now inextricably linked to Doug in the car community.
And last year, Doug expanded beyond YouTube and launched a car auction website called Cars and Bids, which is tightly focused on selling cars made after 1981, something Doug told me he will never change. Now, a lot of YouTubers I know are trying to hedge against YouTube, so I really wanted to know about Doug’s business — how does he make his videos? How big is his team, and how does he manage his costs? These are questions every creator faces, and I think it’s worth exploring them more often.
What’s going to surprise you is how much data from YouTube Doug actually tracks and how he uses that data to make decisions about what videos to make. Doug’s also a product reviewer, so we talked about what reviews are for, who they serve, and how Doug manages to keep himself independent in the face of auto industry glad-handing. Doug was pretty direct that he considers himself a journalist — and direct about how various car companies try to get favorable reviews.
Of course, I also wanted to know about Cars and Bids — how’s it going almost a year later? How many people work there? Is it the exit strategy from the YouTube grind? And if so, how’s he going to get people to use it without calling it out in every video? I think the answers to all of that will surprise you.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Doug DeMuro, you’re the host of a very popular YouTube car review channel. And you run Cars and Bids, a car auction website. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.
I feel like I’ve watched so many videos, I have to say “Cars and Bids” the way that you say it, or go my own way.
Right, right. “Cars and Bids.”
I’m very interested in the dynamic between you running your YouTube channel and using the channel to launch a car auction website. But let’s start with the YouTube channel, it’s very interesting. We talk to a lot of creators on the show. There’s a lot happening in the creator space. When did you launch the channel and when did it become a full-time gig?
I launched the channel in the fall of 2013. There was one video that I launched with. I didn’t have any other videos planned. It was just the one. And at the time I was writing for Jalopnik, which was like, sort of The Verge tech blog of car blogs, basically. It was like the big one that everybody went to. And I had gotten a note from a reader who said, “Hey man, you should make videos.” And this was in 2013. I mean, this was kind of the forefront of this. And I was like, “Huh, that’s an idea.” Of course, now that’s how everybody starts. Video is more now the way to do it.
So I launched the channel at the end of 2013, and then it took off. And at some point in 2015, I realized that I was actually getting more views on the videos than on the writing. And I was like, “Well, maybe I should just be transitioning.” It’s never technically been a full-time job, I’ve always been doing something else on the side, but it has been sort of my main source of income since the end of 2016 or the beginning of 2017. So it’s been five years now — crazy to think about actually.
Those five years seem very short, but in internet time you’ve lived through 50 different iterations of YouTube.
Right.
I went back and watched some of your earliest videos and they bear a striking resemblance to the videos you put up now. The format is kind of the same. How have you thought about the pressures of YouTube as a platform changing versus what your audience is telling you versus what you want to make?
I will say, doing car reviews, you’re kind of insulated from some of the pressures of YouTube. It was interesting throughout this process. I watched from the sidelines the whole, Logan Paul and the “suicide forest.” And I watched on the sidelines, the whole demonetization due to cursing, and then I watched the child-friendly ad things, child videos. And none of that really applied to me because I do car reviews. It hasn’t really been that big of a deal in terms of how I structure my content to kind of deal with YouTube and with their changing policies.
But there is this sort of pressure as a YouTuber to exist to create content and that sort of thing. And that’s always been the tough part of it for me. In terms of them changing the format, it’s interesting. When I first started, I didn’t know what to do. I thought I would do Top Gear-style stuff, like funny videos and stupid car videos and stuff. And over the years I changed a little bit to do these car reviews that I do now. Which I prefer, frankly. So it worked out for the best.
But initially, I did a video about how to pick up women in a Ferrari, which was so stupid, and there was all this dumb stuff. But the reviews are where I prefer to be. And it seems like that’s where a lot of the audience is. More and more people are using YouTube to actually buy a car; “Is this something I’m interested in?” “How does this work?” “How is this better than that?” Whatever. And the automakers haven’t quite caught up with that completely yet, but people are there. And so those videos, they do really well.
The first magazine that I loved, it’s a competition between Wired and Car and Driver. And I feel like my car magazine consumption has tapered in direct correlation with how much car YouTube I watch. Whereas all the other kinds of stuff that Wired covered, I’m reading more in all these other places. But when it comes to cars, I want to see it.
You’re very focused on, “I’m just going to push this button and see what happens and show you what happens” in a way that no written piece of journalism can necessarily capture. But that kind of focus and distilling lets you have a format, and a trademark — have you trademarked “Quirks and Features”?
No, but I think at this point, if you were trying to use that, the YouTube audience would rip you apart. So it might as well be trademarked.
That’s great. You have a secondary enforcement mechanism. Like you don’t need to file the paperwork. The stan army has your back.
Do you find that format limiting? Because that’s kind of the other side of the coin. Now you’re known to deliver X thing and you kind of have to fit everything into X format. Do you find that limiting?
Yeah, for sure. And for a long time I had a second channel where I kind of experimented a little bit more, and now I’ve taken the videos that I used to put on my second channel and I post them on the weekends on our main channel because I think there was an algorithm shift that kind of allowed me to do that. But yeah, it’s limiting for sure. It would be kind of fun to do some other stuff occasionally, but I have to say, I actually love this the most. Of all the content I’ve ever made, written, video, anything, I love checking out the new cars and pushing all the buttons and seeing how it all works. And based on the views, people seem to like that as well. So I don’t know. It is a little limiting, but I love it.
And I’ve been doing this format probably for about five and a half years. And I’m not even slightly tired of it. I would do it for the rest of time. Every single time, to this day, I go get in a new car, there’s like this sense of excitement and wonderment. … Now some cars, I’ve just done a certain new Mercedes, then I do a different one, a lot of the tech is the same, that stuff I’m not as excited about. But I just did this Hyundai pickup truck, which is this little car-based Hyundai truck, it’s really weird. And I was just so excited when they delivered that. I was like, “Oh my God, I can’t wait to see what the hell this thing’s going to be about.” That’s still there, believe it or not.
Is it the Santa Fe?
It’s the Santa Cruz.
Santa Cruz, that’s right.
Which is a terrible naming decision, in my opinion. You have two cars called Santa something.
For the listener, if you haven’t seen a picture of this truck, it does look remarkably crazy.
You just mentioned an algorithm shift that allowed you to start posting more videos. That is kind of what we’re talking about here. Like did you get an email? Did Neal Mohan, the chief product officer at YouTube, let you know? Did you perceive it? How are you tracking that stuff?
That’s a question not that many people ask me about. When people come to me in the street, they only want to talk about cars. They don’t really ask about the business of YouTube, which is half of what I do, right? Like half of it is cars and half of it is YouTube. And I only ever get to discuss this with my fellow creators, so it’s always interesting to me to have these conversations. I am pretty obsessive as far as YouTube creators go. I don’t know anyone else who’s quite as obsessed as me in terms of tracking metrics. And I’m sure there are others, but in terms of car YouTubers, certainly none of them. And so I am able to kind of pinpoint what I believe to be moments in time where there are algorithm shifts.
YouTube doesn’t publicize it. They don’t want you to know. There are a couple reasons. It’s a proprietary algorithm, they don’t want you to know what it is. But I’ve always found it a little bit strange. If they told us a little bit more about the algorithm, we would probably be able to create content that better served it, but they don’t do that. And so anyway, the point is I noticed these shifts and I noticed them with other creators. I pay a lot of attention to what other people are doing, what kind of views they’re getting. And so for the one that we’re talking about, I had started a second channel to do some more creative content because it became clear to me that sort of lesser-viewed videos would pull down your more-viewed videos.
And what I’ve learned, in what I believe to be a recent algorithm shift, was that’s not true anymore. And maybe the algorithm is a little bit more advanced now, and it can detect these videos that are lesser and kind of distinguish between them and the bigger ones. Although I should note, I’m still kind of workshopping that and I’m not sure that’s true. I still need to look at some more data to come up with that conclusion, but that’s what it’s looked like to me. And so, I don’t know, you just have to pay close attention and hope for the best.
You say you’re obsessed about tracking. What are the metrics you’re tracking? Is it view counts? Is it drop-offs? Is it minutes watched?
It’s a lot of different stuff. It’s changed over the years with the algorithm. A couple of years ago, the first five hours was everything. Within the first five hours, I could tell you how popular the video was going to be. That’s changed completely. The algorithm no longer rewards the instant success. It kind of builds over time. And so I tracked that for a long time. The first five hours was everything and the loss rate between hour one and two and three and four. What I’ve learned now is that the one-week number for views is a really, really good metric. And the change between the next morning and the one week is a really good metric. How much is it kind of growing in that time, that now is sort of the metric for me, that it’s going to be a more successful video.
But I also track a lot of other stuff, revenue and watch time. One thing I’ve been interested in recently is that YouTube has provided a new metric, which is you can see where in your video people drop off, like at exactly what point. And I found that tremendously interesting. “Oh, here’s what people don’t want to see.” “Here’s what they want to see more of.” You will even see sometimes videos actually increase in the middle of the video, presumably because people have been linked or something and it’s like, “Oh, well maybe that should have been sooner to hook more people or whatever.” And that is really interesting stuff. They give you so much data that you can peruse.
What’s really interesting about this is, it is true, you seem like the most data-informed YouTuber that I’ve talked to … but for someone who makes something with a format that you’ve just described as kind of rigid, where would you see any of those data learnings coming through as a viewer…
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