I have to give immense credit to YouTube influencer/video host James Pumphrey for the way he’s played his departure from Donut Media. Not since the disappearance of the Lindbergh baby have so many random people been invested in the whereabouts of, let’s face it, a minor celebrity. He’s gone and, with it, Donut Media becomes something else.
‘Minor celebrity’ isn’t a knock here. Becoming famous for doing things on YouTube was only just starting to become a thing when Pumphrey started his “Up to Speed” series for Donut Media. The channel had already existed for a couple of years and had found minor success, but the roman candle enthusiasm of Pumphrey and his internet-pitch-perfect delivery made Donut Media what it is.
And now, after almost a decade, Pumphrey is gone and starting his own channel.
“Donut has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I’m very proud of what the team and I were able to do over the last nine years, grateful for all of the opportunities I was given and thankful for the people I’ve been able to work with,” said Pumphrey. “I’m excited to see what my friends do with the brand I love and look forward to what they have in store. I’ve been working on a new project with Donut’s former CCO Jesse Wood and I’m stoked to share that with the world.”
Pumphrey is the latest in a long series of hosts who have quit their channels shortly after those channels were sold. As I wrote earlier:
While some of the individual situations between CarThrottle, Hoongian, and Donut Media are a little different, they all follow a pattern that Tiernan describes quite succinctly:
- Passionate creatives build company, experience huge growth in YouTube/Insta expansion era.
- Original owners sell for reasons, new money comes in.
- Company gets resold or restructured, cuts costs, squeezes creative, and loses sight of what makes content good in the first place.
- Lacking any true “moat” people leave to start something new.
That is likely what happened here, but I have to credit Donut Media’s new-ish parent company Recurrent with at least recognizing that just letting stars leave and pretending like it didn’t happen until those stars make their own videos is a terrible strategy.
Instead, I got an email yesterday from a PR firm representing Donut Media/Recurrent with an embargo offer: Don’t write about this until their big press push and we’ll give you quotes.
Curious, I agreed, and I got the quote above from Pumphrey and another quote from new Editor-in-Chief Nolan Sykes, who will be familiar to anyone who follows the channel closely.
“I can’t wait for everyone to see what we’ve been working on. We’re going deep into drag racing, we shot a video in a single take which I’m super proud of, and we have a new build coming that I’ve never seen anyone do on Youtube,” said Sykes in the statement. “We’ve been pretty busy. I want to thank James for the years of mentorship and for all the laughs; we had a great, great time. I wish him and his new channel well. I intend to hold to the tenets that got Donut where it is today; and to continue celebrating car culture and the people that make it happen.”
There’s also a planned AMA over on the Donut Media subreddit later today, where most of the posts seem to be pining for the days of yore.
I don’t know if this is quite a win-win for everyone, but Donut Media at least gets to try and maintain some goodwill from its audience and, at the same time, Pumphrey gets a boost for his new channel, which was formed Jesse Wood and, I’m assuming, some other ex-Donut talent.
The new venture is called Speeed and is, so far as I can tell, a YouTube channel. If you want to understand the allure of Pumphrey, his channel with no content already has more YouTube subs than our channel.
As I’ve said before, I think this is more proof that the private equity era of media, as with other things, hasn’t been super successful. The biggest reasons seem to be that the people who buy these properties don’t genuinely care about the content/subject and undervalue the talent.
When “Up to Speed” started taking off I remember a lot of the 1st gen YouTube video creators getting upset, mostly because the content was mostly footage ‘borrowed’ from other people without any sort of permission. Before Instagram and TikTok made remixing videos more popular, a lot of professionals looked down their noses at Donut Media for this.
In doing so, I think a lot of these people missed what the future of Internet content was going to be. Donut Media may have stretched the concept of “fair use” a bit, but the mix of found footage and strong talent like Pumphrey was a sign of what was to come.
Donut Media pivoted more towards original content and pumped out some of the most popular car videos on web. It’s quite possible that Donut Media could do that again and find more talent, though the company now finds itself in the position that existing channels found themselves in a decade ago.
Can Donut Media, now the established player, outperform the nimble upstart? Can it do this now that the nimble upstart is someone they made a star? The internet isn’t zero-sum and both can exist simultaneously. Whether or not Donut will continue to flourish without the same talent is an open question.
The post James Pumphrey Is Out At Donut Media As Private Equity Continues To Scare Off Talent appeared first on The Autopian.
