Jeremy Clarkson is hoping to eat up more of your spare time with an online community for petrolheads, which is called DriveTribe and has absolutely nothing to do with The Grand Tour.
A video posted by the official DriveTribe YouTube channel shows Clarkson explaining that the “new home of epic motoring and pulse-racing adventure’ will launch on the 28th of November, 2016.
“I’m Jeremy Clarkson and I have something in my eye,” Clarkson begins. “But that isn’t important right now. What is important is that you know all about The Grand Tour, the show that James Richard and I are doing for Amazon Prime.”
“Well, this isn’t that. This is something else we’re doing. This [Clarkson trademark pause] is DriveTribe.”
The video then shows various clips of video content taken from the various ‘tribes’ (a nicer way of saying groups), including #CarGuys, #Gamers, #CarGirls and even #Bikes. Guessing Jeremy isn’t the tribe leader on that particular one.
Call it an online community or a digital hub, DriveTribe wants to be a place where users can go to share, read or watch content about the vehicles they love. Users can join tribes or join one made by someone else to soak up the content that interests them.
DriveTribe was setup by Ernesto Schmitt, an entrepreneur who started music publisher peoplesound.com and ZeeBox, an app that merges social media with television viewing. 21st Century Fox is said to be one investor. Andy Wilman, Richard Hammond and James May are also in on it.
“We are taking a sector via a channel and augmenting it with a community around the concept of a tribe. A tribe is a group of people, surrounding a leader, rallying around a common cause. That leads to a huge level of engagement,” Schmitt said in an interview with Business Insider.
To join you need to link your Facebook profile and that has not gone down well. “Why do I need to be a Facebook member? I’m not a teenage girl,” said one YouTuber. “Seems a shame to restrict this to Facebook members only?” echoed another.
A quick look at a DriveTribe Reddit reveals there are also concerns it may never catch on. One user described it as “Google+ for cars,” which is about as harsh as criticism gets. Probably a bit too soon to write it off, eh?
One particular problem is that there are already so many tribes it is easy to be buried. To make matters worse, currently a tribe needs to have 10 members and a minimum of two posts before it can be seen by others, meaning some may never take off at all.
Those with an invite code, which are being sent out now, can contribute straight away ahead of the public launch. In the meantime, check out our thoughts on Clarkson’s other little project.
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