YouSaid · the spoken record

Doug DeMuro

lines on the record: 106
first: 2021-08-24
most recent: 2021-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And by the way, I'm happy to answer these questions in part because I never get to talk about the business, every podcast I go. Everybody wants to talk about cars, which is great, but it is so interesting to discuss this sort of thing to me at least. What's next for Doug the channel? I don't know. I guess more car views, more new cars. I do a big December every year, so I've started to think about that. It's tough. But the ad rates are always higher in December, so I tried to take advantage of that. Next for cars and bids, I think is more growth and more new features. Those are kind of the things that we're looking at, more new cool stuff that we can do to differentiate more and to make an even better experience. There's always a lot of stuff happening. It's a lot of work.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think actually that's one of the things that YouTube really, that's the thing that if it was up to me beyond the transparency, beyond the income, beyond the ad rights, that's the thing that YouTube should be getting taken to task more for is you can't take a break. The algorithm probably punishes you if you do. And that's not really great for people's health. Now, the problem is no one wants to advocate for YouTubers, right? They're living these great lives and making a lot of money and they have the cameras and they're kind of annoying. And so nobody's there helping. There's no YouTube ad. But I really think that's the one thing that I think I wish YouTube would do for creators. Give two weeks off a year average of your last two weeks or whatever. And you don't get penalized or anything for another. That would be nice. But I think you start to get to some employment law situation that they don't want to deal with.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“shoot 12 18 weeks of content beforehand and then i could take you know a paternally leave that's not always that easy on other platforms and i don't know it's just harder youtube makes it is a is a good way to to live if you can”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but the deals are just never that good. That's the problem. The flexibility that I have is wild. I can shoot a video in a day. Whereas shooting a scene, I shot a commercial with Audi the other day, a couple months ago, and shooting a couple scenes in a four minute commercial took a whole day, like shooting maybe 30 seconds of footage that they used took like a day. I can shoot like a 34 minute video in a morning, you know? And like, be home. I'm just going up to LA and having to do all that stuff with TV or even if it came here and doing all the canned trap. I just, they're never great. If someone can to me and was like, you could do this cool thing for Netflix or whatever. And it like really jived with my life, I would do it. But I don't know. Right now it's just hard to look past the benefit you get from the pure schedule flexibility on YouTube. Like my wife is having a baby here in a couple of weeks. Congratulations. I'm able to...”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some other creators are talking to, especially the more lifestyle creators they're trying to leverage themselves into TV shows or Netflix deals or Hulu deals or whatever. I'm assuming a lot of people have approached you to make Doug for peacock or whatever it is. Does that interest you?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's an interesting point. YouTube has kind of drawn this line in the sand. This is how transparent we want to be. And yeah, maybe people will want more transparency, but it's just so hard because Disruptors come. Right now, there doesn't look like a truly viable YouTube disruptor, but I wouldn't have said that about a lot of stuff three years ago. And you never really know. And yeah, creators are generally a little disappointed with it. I'm on YouTube or Facebook pages and closed car YouTuber groups. You get complaints and you hear them. And I get it. You know, some days, some months your ad rates are way down. You're like, it doesn't make any sense. But you kind of just have to take the bad with the good. I just look at the opportunity that I was given in this amazing life. And I realize even if it did turn off tomorrow, it was a pretty cool few years, you know?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cars and bids is pretty much that, and also a fairly engaged following that I think I could maybe bring elsewhere if I had to, like the site. But I don't know. I believe in YouTube. I believe in the product. I believe in what they offer. The greatest thing that YouTube ever gave us was the democratization of stuff. You can get how-to videos without having to check out a book at the library or buy a book or buy information. You can get car reviews. I can do car reviews without having to work my way up at a magazine where I'd still be making coffee for people at this age. It's so cool to be able to have that. And that, for me, like from a pure information perspective, I know YouTube has flaws and they would probably recognize it as well. But from a pure perspective of like...”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is an interesting question. In some ways, yeah. And in some ways, it's not that I don't trust it. It's just that I don't know. Like, I don't expect they're doing secretive stuff or they're trying to screw me or anything. But I live in a world where I just make sure of everything. And you can't, really. And so, do I trust YouTube? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, truthfully, they've given us a great life. So, yeah. But at the same time, you're always a little bit nervous, I think, is the answer.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will say, I bought a Ford Raptor last year and I showed my wife your video you should buy a Ford Raptor and her response was will this make you stop talking about it? And it was like the best investment. No, definitely not. Now he's talking about how cool it”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, you know, the thing is, though, that's an interesting point. It's so funny on the channel. Sometimes they'll say, hey, I can't afford this new car. People are like, what do you mean you got a 4G? Well, that 4GT is up 15% value since I bought it. Whereas new cars, people, all these other YouTubers buy new Lamborghinis, the cars lose $100,000 in value within the first year. But I'm like, this is a terrible decision. How can you do this? Nothing that I buy, I tried no big purchases I buy. I tried to make sure they at least retain their value to some extent.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or from an education perspective, they don't know what the hell they're doing. I'm rare also in the sense that I got an economics degree from a decent college and I intended to work at a desk job my whole life and it just sort of happened. And so I beg my other YouTube colleagues who do crazy stuff with their money. I say please, please invest, save, buy property, buy anything you possibly can because this won't last forever. My exit in part looks like me I've been cautious for a few years and I'll continue to be cautious for as many years as I can and that's the biggest advice I can give to any YouTuber on the planet or anybody trying to do anything in entertainment is just be really really cautious if I do ever if people do ever get tired of me and they want they're done with me on YouTube I feel pretty confident that I could survive for a long time before having to get some sort of extra job. I try to”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the thing about YouTube is a lot of guys just or people just kind of lucked into YouTube. They started making videos here and there It just sort of happened. And so a lot of people aren't that qualified financially.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And that was something we always thought about, and it's something we often think about still if we do ever sell it. Yeah, they're going to want Doug because he's a part of it. I will say, if you go on the site, you'll notice there's not a lot of Doug integrated into it, and that was intentional for that reason. We wanted to be able to break it away if we could. Either in a sale or honestly, if it ever sort of became bigger and different than Doug, they wanted to go in different directions, we could do that. And so aside from that little thing I write in each listing, you know, it could stand alone. And the goal, I think, is to get it big enough to the point where it does stand alone and you don't really need Doug. But yeah, I'm terrified if some buyer is going to want to come and be like, hey, okay, we want the site, but we also want Doug. And I'm like, I don't want to do all this crap anymore. Get me out of here.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happens if you sell it if you get burned out of YouTube and you're like cars and bids is my job and you're marketing funnel goes away that's one risk if you sell cars and bids They're going to be like, well, now we want 50 videos a month to increase the funnel.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know, but hopefully it just continues in this path. And I have thought about what if I hate to decide I hate these people and want out. Like, I'm doing this. I don't know. But that hasn't happened. And our fingers are crossed that it doesn't.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. Truthfully, I don't know the answer to that question. We're terrified to find out. We're terrified to stop advertising the videos because what if people don't come?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It ain't easy, and it's especially difficult to get people to it. It's difficult enough to set up a website that works in this fashion. That was hard. But to actually bring people there, that's a whole other thing, and especially when there are established players that you're competing against. How do you compete against people where sellers know they'll get top dollar at XYZ website? How do you compete? You have to have a huge audience. And I think you can really only do that if you already have a huge audience, basically.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, there's no question about that. In part because somehow I became kind of ubiquitous in the online car space. And so thus it was easy to kind of direct people to a product like this. And I'll tell you, proof of the fact that I'm still kind of the driver. There have been other sites that have popped up since we launched. There hadn't been a lot of others before we launched, but since we launched many others have popped up. And nearly all of them have failed. And I think people see, oh, there's stupid Doug with his stupid t-shirt and shorts this website. It must be easy.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course. And I'm sure all startups have those. And yeah, we, oh, it would be nice to have someone doing this while the revenue needs to increase. Maybe we should do this or that to increase revenue. But I don't know. It's been increasing in scale. And so to us, that's kind of the biggest thing. If we can just kind of get more cars, more users, all the problems sort of take care of themselves, basically.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got a lower commission rate than some of the competitors. You said you're profitable. Like, what's the balance there? Are you having those kinds of business conversations every day where you're like, we want to hire more people? We got to make more money.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should Cars, it is some of the prices that are, I am blown away. And I'll tell you, I can't take credit for any of that. Holy crap, the current car market is wild.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The window only forward, right? It'll only move to newer cars. It will not go older than 1981. And people think this is crazy. And it seemed crazy when we launched. It seems a little less crazy now. Sustainable business to be built from doing this. There is a big market in this type of car. And truthfully, it was the cars that I was the most interested in. And to be completely candid, it's more difficult to sell the 50s and 60s stuff is less verifiable. Records are less verifiable. And to be totally honest, the owners of those cars often have a more difficult grasp sort of of the online auction process. And going after younger people has enabled us to be a little bit more streamlined than our competition.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People ask us this all the time what if someone submitted a 1960s Ferrari that was worth a million dollars, you would turn it down? Yes, we are not going to go older, at least right now. We have no plans. It hasn't even come up. What we see is this trend is just going to continue. Young people are interested in the cars they were interested in they were young. Some young people have money. Some older people are interested in the cars that young people like as well. And I think that the trend is just going to continue. And the good thing about our business is every year, you know, it expands one more year, right? That's the thing.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're targeting sort of a younger audience 80s, 90s modern classic cars. There's a lot of interest in that stuff. Like, what's the next audience you're targeting? Are you going to try to go get some boomers and do some 50 corvettes? Are you going to be like, Gen Z wants 2002 Acuras, and that's what we're doing next?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. We consulted a lot of attorneys and stuff. The good news is the legal technicalities are not as substantial going across state lines. A lot of people, and even into Canada, it hasn't been that difficult. The more difficult part is we've been asked by a lot of our viewers and our fans, because a lot of my audience is foreign, has asked, hey, why don't you just expand to Australia? Why don't you expand to Europe? And that's a little bit just a little bit more difficult, the regulatory stuff there. It's a lot of work on our end to try to think through it, and we're not sure if it would work even. But no, for the states, we did spend a lot of time trying to figure that stuff out. And there were some states where it's a little bit more complicated, and we kind of had to tweak certain policies or whatever, but we got it done.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got service history for some of these cars in the week having the auctions last for a week gives you the opportunity to pursue an inspection beforehand if you want. You can kind of organize that when the car lists before it sells. So I don't know. It's tough for people, but yeah, we kind of figured out we distilled down what you absolutely need to know about a car. And our hope is that that will provide you with the information that you can to make a rational decision, a purchase decision. And honestly, very few people come back to us and say the car was not represented correctly. Very, very few. I was really afraid of that, that it would like tarnish my reputation and blah, blah, blah. That almost never happens. There's just so much info in these listings”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have a lot of experience buying and selling cars. The auction part is difficult because you basically have seven days to make a decision, these people on these cars. But I'll tell you something. Some of these people are sending 300 photos and videos and a description. And they're spending a week answering questions. And you got the car facts. I mean, you know, like at the end of the day, there's not a lot more you're going to uncover from all that stuff.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of what I do on a day now. The submission form is pretty involved. You have to submit like a hundred photos. Do you have like a lot of experience buying and selling cars at auction or is this kind of like a clean sheet? This is what it should be like.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, a lot. You know, one of the stupidest things I ever did was I write my opinion of each car in each auction. And so now I'm writing 20 of these a day. This is the stupidest, truly the stupidest thing I ever did. It's not scalable at all, and I don't know what we're going to do. But that, yeah, no, it's a lot more work. And, you know, it's important to me to put out a product that's really super high quality, which is kind of funny if you watch my videos because they're sort of amateurish. I wanted to launch this and make it damn good. And so I'm pretty involved trying to make sure, like when stuff is misspelled, I like kind of get on my team. Like, this can't happen. When stuff, the spacing is not right or words are wrong. That irks me. And I'm there every single day. Most of what I do on a day now is cars and stuff.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I honestly don't know. I don't come from a startup world. I don't know anybody in my entire life personally who's ever founded a startup. So I don't live in that world. And so that wasn't even a thumbing I was thinking about when we were starting this, which now seems ridiculous. The answer is it kind of just depends on what happens. I would be happy to run it forever and make good money or sell it if the right offer comes along. I truly and honestly don't know.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't fund the whole thing. I launched it sort of with a company here in San Diego that sort of funds some startups or wanted to, and we were kind of the first. And then I have a partner who's like my co-founder, and it was his company. And so they kind of backed us financially. And now that we're profitable, it's a big load-off. When you take on investors, that's a big thing you're thinking. There's a lot of pressure.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody's remote. Most of us are in San Diego just by chance. My partner's here and then a couple other people. And then we moved a guy out here thinking we'd have an office, but we've all agreed that an office is not the way to go. We now have people over the country. A couple of people, a couple of our writers are in Europe. But yeah, what were we thinking? Watch this business into COVID. But you know what's funny? Obviously, you've seen what's happened in the car world, in the home prices, the consumer anything, any consumer goods have gone up. We got lucky when we launched the business, we had spent so much of our initial costs paying salaries and developing it, whatever. We were basically like, we need to launch this because we need to start making some revenue. And we kind of thought it would fail because we launched it in June of 20 and it was the worst time in the world to do anything. But obviously it would actually turn out to be the perfect time. And so it worked out okay.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because people in the creating space, that's the first thing they want to know. This is interesting. You took this audience and moved them to a different thing. And apparently it is pretty interesting. It seemed to me to be kind of a logical move. But at the same time, I look at it and say, it wasn't is an enormous undertaking, an enormous amount of work. I have my channel I keep really low overhead. Well, cars and bids, we have a dozen employees. Like it's a whole different ballgame. And that was all very, very different. Very difficult.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, no, that's not, I don't think that that's a legitimate strategy really if you're trying to diversify away from YouTube. You've got to look at it and be like, that's not, how is that the smart move, basically? When I looked at it, it seemed to me to be clear that the smart move is to create something like this. I didn't really realize that not that many creators had done it.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was clear to me that there was room for more. The biggest competitors, I think, were leaving a little bit of room for more. And also, I don't know if I had known how hard it was going to be. I should have just got on TikTok. I often tell my business partner, I should have just started damn podcast. It would have been way easier. But the benefit of this is now that it's been a year, I don't feel like we're safe in this business at any stretch of the imagination, but we've proven the concept. It's working. We're profitable. We're running 20 car auctions a day. Like this worked. And the benefit now is, here's something I actually possess that I could sell or that I could transition to and the channel isn't really quite like that.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a couple things I do see with the algorithm and with YouTube. Views are slowing down, and that's generally true among car YouTubers. There are more of us now, and so it seems to me that we're sharing in it more. When I first started this, the views were definitely stronger. Now, interestingly, income is up almost enough to compensate, so it hasn't really been a problem, but I could see it being a problem. The biggest issue that I have, though, with YouTube ultimately is I'm not in control of any of this stuff. So at the end of the day, they could turn it off tomorrow. It's obviously not in their best interest to do that, but I still worry. And so, yeah, Cars and Bids was born from the desire to diversify. And also, I just, it wasn't just necessarily a thought that I would lose YouTube or lose the revenue or lose the views. It was also like, I've got this platform. I would be stupid if I didn't take more advantage of it somehow. And so I just felt like I kind of had to. It is a diversification in a sense, but it was also like, you're lucky. No one else has this platform.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way that's expressed is the algorithm changes and everyone chases the new format. And then they burn it out, and the algorithm changes everyone, and you're like, here's my format, and I'm going to use the data to review different kinds of cars with the structure is there. What's really interesting about this is I have this whole series of questions about why you launched cars and bids and kind of baked into them as an assumption is you need to diversify away from YouTube in case there's burnout or the algorithm kills you, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I worry about it, but it's never happened. Like I told you before, I am still every time I go to film a car, I'm so excited. I am terrified. I swear one day I know I'm going to show up and be like, this sucks. I don't want to do this. But it has never happened. And I've been doing it a long time. So I don't know. Yeah, maybe someday I'll get burned out. I do worry about it because I hear about other creators doing it. And I also think for a lot of creators, you can kind of tell when they're just like, they got to turn out content, but they're not into it. And I'm very lucky that that hasn't happened for me yet.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is fascinating. And whenever I watch some of these people, I think to myself, oh my gosh, that could happen to me. But my personality comes through in the videos to an extent. But at the end of the day, yeah, I'm doing a car review. I think it's in some senses easier to a product review because I hear a lot about the pressure to come up with content from my fellow YouTubers. And I have the opposite problem. I have too much content. I have the pressure of scheduling everything and actually getting everything filmed and that sort of thing. And I definitely would rather be in my position than try to come up with something new every day or every week.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something I hadn't even considered is the concept of the difference between a YouTuber who does lifestyle content and product reviews until MKBHD podcast market has brought that out. And I was like, huh, I never even thought that I guess some of these people fall off the face of the earth because people get tired of them. People will surely get tired of me, but at the end of the day, you're doing product reviews, like the product is the new thing, not the lifestyle thing that you're the weird new thing you decided to do that day for views. And so I think as long as I can do product reviews, I think it'll sustain. I hope so for a long time. That's the dream.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I get more money up front, but I think long term people get annoyed with the content and I think people question your objectivity. And I think one of the reasons that I've been able to remain kind of near the top in cars is because there's not that stuff and people believe the stuff I'm telling them, not I'm getting paid off. And I think that that's a really, really important standard to maintain. And so, yes, I know my colleagues are making more from those ads than they will for the whole video, no matter how long it's up. And I'm not getting that. But I think, I mean, I've been at this eight years. I think that longevity is rare on YouTube and it's kind of shown it's kind of proven that thought.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I almost never do those. So I've only done four in the entire time I've done this. There's a reason for that. And the main reason is I have always felt that because I feel like I'm a journalist reviewing these products, in order for me to have like a kind of an objective, non-biased standard, I think it's bad form to have a stupid ad at the start of every video, especially because you can just tell some of these guys are so hollow the way they introduce it. Like, you should check out this watch or whatever. And it's like, they're so obviously not believing in it. They're just kind of reading a script. I don't like to do a lot of them. But at the same time, I look at everybody else doing them every video and I'm like, well, I should, you know, here and there, I should do one. And so if it's a product that I've used or a product that I like, I will occasionally do them. But yeah, I don't like doing that stuff. And also, and I think the real key, the real important reason I don't do those kind of things, and I like to believe this is true, is I've always felt, and my wife's always felt, that if I do those,”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that, but also because at the same time I was working for Zlotnik, I was working for another publication where we would go on the trips and we all kind of thought it was stupid, but I saw firsthand the guy from the Schenectady Eagle is getting flown out to Palm Springs to review some new supercar. And I'm like, how is this happening? Like, I can't believe this is so... I just don't trust these things anymore. And, you know, you mentioned the camera industry. Don't you think the travel industry is probably the same?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like a part of that comes because you started at Chalopnik, which was militant about that stuff, too. Do you think that's where it comes from? And then that's maybe why the other car YouTubers don't do it that way.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what I always tell the automakers about cars. You know, I just got an invite to go drive the new Ford Maverick in Nashville. And, you know, they probably have some country music themed thing that you get to go to. Just bring the car to my damn house. I'll drive it around my neighborhood where I usually drive, and then I'll review the car. I don't want the special treatment because there might be a day when you make something that I want to review negatively. And when that day comes, I don't want to sit there and say, boy, if I review this negatively, I'm not going to get to go on that next trip. They're going to cut me off from getting that next car. And so I've also always maintained very close relationships with car dealerships. I just had an incident this week where an automaker told me no, they wouldn't let me review a certain car. And I called up a dealer and I'm reviewing it tomorrow anyway. It's like, well, you can do this. And I'm cool with that. And so if an automaker thinks I've said too many negative things, fine. I got other sources. I'll figure it out. But my journalist, the other guys don't always do that.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of this product. I think that shit's crazy. I don't know if I want to say that. I think that's okay. When I go on press trips, I pay my own way. And I think I'm the only car journalist right now who's doing it. The New York Times used to also do it, but they stopped reviewing cars probably because it was so costly. But I'll put myself up at a day's in, you know, a couple miles away. I don't want to be involved in any of that stuff. I make good money from YouTube and I don't want anybody to ever accuse me of, oh, you took some $400 flight from whatever you're biased. It's like, no, I can do it all myself just to be completely free of that kind of stuff. But be careful when you watch car reviews or frankly any product reviews, but especially cars because you have to get the person to the thing. It's very different than giving a product. And I just find that to be so ethically troublesome personally.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm militant about stuff like that. So for years I didn't take press cars when COVID hit, my wife and I were trying to get pregnant, and I just couldn't go into car dealers. And so we felt we had a little bit of a higher risk. So I started taking more press cars. And that's kind of continued. So I do that now. I would say a third of the cars that I reviewed are delivered to my house and I filmed them and they're from the automaker. But other than that, I don't have any stock in any automaker at any capacity ever. I'm very cautious about press trips all of my journalist compatriots go on free press trips. This is something that not everybody is aware of, but I'm sure you are. The automaker pays to fly the journalist, often business class, to whatever city. They put him up in a beautiful hotel and they give you this amazing experience. Often it's one day is a driving day of the car. But then the second day is like an adventure at a theme park or a private tour of something or whatever. Then you're supposed to go home and write an objective review.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I say I'm a journalist, what I tend to mean is there's a tiny link on every Verge page that says ethics statement and you can click it and that will tell you we don't have stock in Tesla. I'm not allowed to own any. We can't take things for free. And if we do take review samples, we have to give them back and on and on and on. Is that what you're trying to communicate? Is that from your time at Jalopnik? How does that play out for you?”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I consider myself to be more of a journalist than an entertainer. I'm doing product reviews, a lot of people, a lot of in market car shoppers are basing decisions, or at least partially basing decisions off what I'm doing. And so I consider myself mostly to be a journalist. The automakers are the most interesting thing about this question. They vary in how they consider us. Some of them call me a journalist and are very, they want to get the product out to me as soon as possible for a review, just like the magazines, whatever. Some of them don't want to work with YouTubers. They don't care. They see us as influencers still. And I'm like, listen, an enormous portion of your buyers are using videos like this to buy cars and they just haven't got there yet. It's an interesting kind of mix about what is the legitimacy of this career.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, right before we came on, you said you think of yourself as a journalist. There's a Venn diagram of being a journalist, of being a YouTuber, of being an influencer, of being an entrepreneur on YouTube. Tell me why you say you're a journalist.”
2021-08-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The quirks and features of YouTube car reviews with Doug DeMuro · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT