FoodTribe

» see foodtribe.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

DriveTribe launched on 28 November 2016, two months before its three presenters put out the first season of The Grand Tour, and it was funded like a technology company rather than a fan site. Five and a half million dollars came from Breyer Capital and Atomico, then six and a half million more from 21st Century Fox three weeks later. A further round in 2019 was reported as backed by Elisabeth Murdoch. The product was a network of "tribes", each one a channel somebody ran about a specific corner of cars, with the famous three posting into the middle of it.

In September 2019 the same company pointed the same software at food. FoodTribe was DriveTribe with the subject swapped: tribes about baking or barbecue, an editor on staff, apps in both stores, and a plan to keep spinning out verticals after it. The seams showed if you opened the page source, where the images came off drivetribe.imgix.net and the stylesheets off assets.drivetribe.com with foodtribe as a folder inside the car site's build.

Top Gear traveled further than almost any British program ever made, and it reached Turkey the way it reached everywhere, dubbed and rerun for a decade. What did not travel was the website. A social network in English about cooking, pitched at an audience that followed three presenters, had no reason to show up on anybody's screen here, and it did not.

~ the case file ~

~ why a food version existed at all ~

Because the hard part was already paid for. A company that has already built a publishing platform and an advertising sales team has a strong internal argument for running a second brand on the same stack, since the second one costs a fraction of the first. Cars are the most lucrative enthusiast advertising category there is. Food is the biggest.

What the argument ignores is that the audience was never there for the subject. It was there for the people, and the people were car presenters. FoodTribe got the infrastructure and the sales team and none of the reason anybody had shown up.

~ three weeks in January ~

The announcement came on 10 January 2022 and named two causes without hedging: marketing budgets across the automotive industry had come down, and the global shortage of computer chips meant manufacturers had fewer cars to sell and less need to advertise them. Both sites would close at the end of the month. Richard Hammond said the community would continue through the YouTube channels and the usual social accounts, which is what you say.

The crawl bracket is tight and slightly comic. On 11 January 2022, the day after the notice, foodtribe.com still answers with a full 52-kilobyte application, Google ad slots loading and all. By the end of February the address no longer serves a site. Three weeks is short notice for a platform that asked people to build communities on it, and nobody ever published an export tool.

~ where the names went ~

The FoodTribe YouTube channel outlived the website and was renamed What Next? in June 2022, dropping food in favor of whatever the hosts wanted to make, which is the honest ending for a brand that was a format rather than a subject.

The domains went opposite ways. foodtribe.com answers 000 on both schemes today, no server, no parking page. drivetribe.com answers 200 with a full site titled The Home Of High End Motoring Content, which somebody rebuilt on the strength of the name after the company that made it had gone. The car brand was worth buying. The food one was not worth the renewal.

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