Matt Hardigree
A long-time writer and editor in the car space, you may have read my work in Wired, Jalopnik, and the newsletter for my local Ultimate Frisbee team. I love writing about the car industry, driving minivans, and dreaming about owning various European Fast Fords. I drive an E39 530i Sport (with the stick) and a CR-V Hybrid. You can email me at matt@theautopian.com or follow me
on Instagram. Oh, I'm also the Publisher of The Autopian. That seems less interesting than the European Fords thing, though.
Hey! Spent my $5 today not expecting a name check (and I just mentioned this in a comment on Jason’s story). Still dying to debate you guys about this on a podcast somewhere! You are, of course, totally wrong about everything on that list, but a) you’re still right about a lot, b) I totally love you guys, and c) if I believed in reincarnation and actually understood how it worked, I’d suspect Mercedes Streeter is a reincarnated me.
Aw, I take that as a huge compliment! 🙂 Welcome to the madhouse! Don’t worry, we love you here.
We love you, too, Aaron Gold!
Now you know why they don’t send me on any press trips.
I am willing to travel with Jason as personal security.
Only if I am armed with a device that shoots snot bubbles and takes a ridiculously long time to deploy.
Sure Matt, send the MOTT before you to take the bad rap. Also Jason: Never change
About the delightful gent with the two-word greeting?
I dug out the charming three-named feller’s NYT 2014 article on the Mirage and will provide a gift link below.
Here’s what I don’t get:
Given that he bangs on and ON about the CVT, did it occur to maybe test a Mirage with the stick, to see if it was a more enjoyable experience? Was it because he might have to eat some of his words?
Anyway. If you must; I read it so you don’t really have to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/automobiles/autoreviews/its-cheap-but-is-it-overpriced.html?unlocked_article_code=1.NVA.pWaM.6mwSiD-B5GN6&smid=url-share
FWIW, I drove the stick-shift Mirage at the press launch (Quebec City), and it was a little terrible as far as manuals go, though my First Drive for About.com has long since been lost to history.
wow, real content by real car people brings in real users and people willing to pay for the good content? strange.
Probably just another lame ass Social trying to give us Greasers a hard time because his #1 gal likes the cut of Jason’s jib
Need to send Jason on an “apology for things I don’t remember” tour, haha.
A Tour-chinsky, as it were.
Torché my friend!
I have had to do so many of those. Damn tequila.
Jason correctly outed a bunch of journos who were getting kickbacks from the Red Signal Lamp lobby, and they’re all mad.
We must fight for our amber signal lamps, people. Don’t let them continue to make tail lamps less interesting and more confusing.
I feel like the pile on after the 1st altercation may have been a mob mentality kind of thing. Whereas when confronted directly by above six foot tall Matt or when alone in the woods with David probably not as opportune moments.
I am HERE for the drama, keep spilling the tea, Matt!
Well, this was very confusing.
“Writers for that publication were complaining that they were being cut, and the official word was that the masthead would end up subservient to another, larger one.”
I’m not sure how one magazine title being absorbed by another (no matter who wrote about it) would result in cutting off access to press vehicles–unless the parent title somehow had a bad reputation with automakers.
It also would have been easier to follow if you had named this mystery editor X instead of using a variety of longer-than-needed phrases to refer to him.
Also, having read the earlier article (and filling in the blanks) I was expecting far more drama based on the headline. But, at the end of the day, it sounded rather… mundane.
Agree. This was hard to follow with all the “this guy, that guy, over here, over there.” How about: naming the person, linking to the article in question, and just generally telling a coherent story from beginning to end instead of the stream of consciousness take this reads as.
If it’s worth telling the story, then be a journalist and tell the story. If you don’t want to name names or link an article for fear of hurting someone’s feelings, then you don’t really want to tell the story. – so don’t.
In other news, someone honked at me yesterday (but I’m not going to explain the who, what, where, when, or why, as that might hurt someone’s feelings)
I’m a data analyst and those are some damn good website performance numbers! Especially compared with the competition. Y’all are killing it!
I have to know, what kind of other metrics are important to a website? How many tabs are open? How many are from competitors? Where I came from, where I went?
Often you can see what URL someone came from, particularly if it was another one on your site. Bounce rate shows how many people visit the site and leave without clicking anything. Depending on your analytics setup, you can also track how far down any given page users have scrolled. Some platforms allow for heat mapping over your pages so you can see what elements were interacted with the most. That can also be shown by a breakdown of buttons clicked/videos started, forms submitted, etc. Often you can track how long a video was played for as well. Location is also possible, the most granular level usually being city. If you’re running ads, they allow for tracking code that lets you see what ad a visitor clicked on to get to your site. You can also see the search terms people used if they found your site organically. Just off the top of my head!
All that said, the data is anonymous, and usually viewed in aggregate. Tracking cookies have to be accepted in order to allow certain things to be tracked. For example, where I work, we can’t track a user’s journey through the site (the aggregate of all pages viewed by a single user is called a session), unless they accept cookies. Our rules are more strict because we deal with healthcare information.
Bounce rate feels like a bit of a weird metric. It makes sense on the surface, but it’s probably not really useful unless it excludes people coming in via RSS feeds.
I agree those are sound numbers, but there is always the concern about how many of those visits are bots (for any site). All sites have bot traffic (regardless of what your robots.txt file say), and the more popular a site is, the more bots you get. So when looking at any analytics numbers my first question always is what is your bot exclusion strategy, because we are not talking just about search engine crawling anymore. Even sites with very little traffic have bots crawling all over them, which can easily be 40% of the traffic.
I am sure there is plenty of bot traffic, but those are all major sites, so they are all getting scraped by bots, at what I would expect is a similar amount. So that variable can be eliminated unless one of these has somehow stopped bots from navigating to them.
It’s funny you mention that because I’ve been working on a bot traffic strategy for the past couple weeks. Tons of bots from China popped up near the end of last year. And then there’s those small American towns that host web servers/cyber security firms that drive a ton of bots. Ashburn VA, Boardman, OR, and San Mateo, CA are all major offenders across the web. So we are excluding those cities from our data and setting up anomaly detection to look for spikes in page views, as that’s often how bot traffic appears, all at once in a short timeframe. It’s a pain in the ass and just keeps getting worse. We have something like 200 million rows of web analytics data alone, so it’s a lot to monitor. Literally will be spending the rest of this week and most of next dealing with bot traffic.
Try FouAnalytics.com, it gives you a much clearer picture of “all” the traffic, what is bots, and likely bots vs humans– shows you stuff that analytics is discarding. It looks unpolished, but that’s because it’s run by a programmer.
Unfortunately I’d never be allowed to use a platform like that for work. Because it’s healthcare there’s so many regulations and policies we have to follow, the GDPR and lots of internal stuff on top of that. We have to go through a months long approval process just to select a new analytics tool.
That’s an odd assortment. Ashburn makes sense – that’s a huge percentage of US datacenters and PoPs.
Oregon is mostly hyperscalers, but there’s still a decent cluster of them right there.
San Mateo.. feels like a single outlier company with a small office the IPs are geolocating to or something. There’s no major datacenters there. Might be better served by excluding by ASN or address block for these.
I had never heard of carscoops.com before and for insideevs.com to get more traffic than Road & Track is pretty depressing.
To be fair, they write some pretty interesting pieces.
R/T is paywalled, that might be a factor. I assume carscoops and insideEVs are not, but am too uninterested in scoops or EVs to find out for sure.
A lot of this is the paywall, for sure.
I like InsideEV’s, but it is very specific in most cases. Never been to Carscoops though.
If you wanna publicly beef for the publicity, I gotchu
I will fight you!
yeah well your momma’s so rubber but what am glue?
(I’m not very good at this)
Your momma’s seen plenty of rubbers that’s for sure.