I’ve had two separate people tell me today that they’d become a member of the site if the little video player that appears went away. Well, you drive a hard bargain, but you have a deal! (Actually, after listening to you, dear readers, we removed almost all display advertising for members months ago, but these two don’t need to know that!).
I wrote about this in June, but I suppose not everyone sees everything through our huge wall of ads (kidding! We think we have a fairly tasteful ad situation, relatively speaking). We’ll have a post later that talks about all the things you get with membership (fun, exclusive emails; exclusive posts that tell you more about the lives of the authors, and also the weird stuff we all talk about in Slack as we work hard to run the site; extended Discord access; the password that I’m told gets you into Jacques Nasser’s secret speakeasy underneath the Joe Lewis statue; a little member badge attached to your account; great merch for higher tiers; et cetera). But I suppose it’s worth reiterating what goes away: Display ads and the pop-up video player (which becomes an in-post, non-autoplaying video).
Being reliant on Google is a liability for any publication these days, so membership means more to us now than ever, which is why it’s so important that you all feel you’re getting great value out of it. It’s more fun building a community of incredible people like yourselves, and it’s a more stable source of revenue that rewards us for writing the stuff you want to read.
Also, we’re basically incapable of being consistent or clever enough to write a bunch of SEO-optimized posts about picking the perfect valve stem caps or wiper blades (this is the kind of stuff that many competitors have had to write to bring in revenue). Instead, we want to write about which characters from The Simpsons have names that overlap with automobiles. It’s who we are.
[Ed Note: Simpsons writer/producer Josh Weinstein even read Torch’s post!
This is a delightful article! Who knew there actually was a Burns auto-buggy very similar to the one he drives!
(Also, btw, Nelson IS named after Madman Muntz, the famous LA car dealer) https://t.co/RZfmIysPFb pic.twitter.com/tlYF3u34CM
— Josh Weinstein (@Joshstrangehill) November 21, 2025
How cool is that?! -DT]
Our video player serves an important purpose, which is why it’s there. But removing it for members is a no-brainer, not just because it makes sense numbers-wise, but because it feels right. Anyone who reads this site regularly and contributes their hard-earned Deutschmarks to our automotive dipshittery should get reprieve from ads. It’s a no-brainer.
While we’re welcoming into our membership community a good percentage of those who basically read every story, it’s not everyone. That’s totally fine; not all readers can or want to pay for a publication, and though the free-internet model isn’t sustainable anymore, the internet started off free, and that has inertia. Still, if half the people who regularly read us became members (or if everyone who is in the upper 1% of folks who reads everything does) we’d basically not have to sweat Google at all, meaning we’d be able to purely, solely write wacky stories that you want.
I want to reiterate of course that, if you’re not able to be a member (by clicking here), we of course still appreciate you reading the site; the internet is so vast, and for you to spend your time here is a true honor. If you’re already a member: Thank You! Exciting new things are coming soon.
That’s a lot of words. Here’s a sweet Lamborghini Miura P400 S going up for sale next year from Broad Arrow Auctions:
I love how, similar to their radios, Lamborghini could never quite decide on a fog light/blinker configuration for the Miura. This might just be a localization thing, but I’m not sure I’ve seen exactly this layout.
Aww, the Miura has eyelashes!!!
& this article just made me realise that my membership expired and I didnt know. Will reup ASAP.
It’s a good thing to support the art/media/culture that you consume! Happy to pay a bit for this place to keep running, and happy to be able to pay!
That Miura has the standard light configuration for an early one. From outboard in are the blinkers, the driving lights, and then a pair of aftermarket fog lights, which are coincidentally the factory fog lights from a Countach. Looks like the owner just wanted extra fogs, and whatever company makes them supplied them for the Countach and a few other European cars in the 70s and 80s.
That Miura has the standard light configuration for an early one. From outboard in are the blinkers, the driving lights, and then a pair of aftermarket fog lights, which are coincidentally the factory fog lights from a Countach. Looks like the owner just wanted extra fogs, and whatever company makes them supplied them for the Countach and a few other European cars in the 70s and 80s.
The Autopian is the only website that I visit where there is literally a five second delay before the site opens. Are y’all running code to mine bitcoin in the background or something? Yeah yeah yeah cleared my cache, deleted history, done it all. And no one, NO ONE is clicking play on that docked video.
I think it’s part of the charm of the website or something. Like waiting for a carbureted V8 to warm up when you could just be driving a plug-in hybrid instead.
From what I remember from my web dev days is that google will de-rank slow sites. One of their metrics was how fast a page loads. This was many years ago, so I have no idea if it is still true.
I’ve picked up from various bits of articles over time that this site is:
a.) built off a huge/ancient WordPress template
b.) spun off from Galpin’s website (which is not a blog)
…so yeah, hopefully one day they can re-tool but it’s slower than James May for sure.
What got me to join was twofold- First and foremost was the post by Matt that equated membership to a magazine subscription. That resonated with me, and was 80% of the choice. The other 20% was the lack of ads. I’m only a cloth member because the extras don’t hold value for me- I don’t like “things” and try to live a minimal lifestyle. I have cleaned out and moved too many relatives with more crap than they know what to do with, and I don’t want my kids in that situation.
FWIW- I pay $40/year for physical Hemmings Motor News. $50/year for Cloth is a solid value.
Now that I am a paying member again, Matt and David will at least get some renumeration for my shit talking and life advice they have to scroll through.
Deal.
For those of us who aren’t members (yet), can we get a different video than just the 100,000 mile Murano?
Serious question, as that video “advertisement” only seems to show Autopian videos.
… does that… generate meaningful revenue?
It’s not 3rd party product. It’s minutes of video snippets of your content.
Video is… not small.
Some of those videos feature the CrossCab which has XPEL on it, and there was a promotion deal with XPEL[1], but… it’s still video. I realize bandwidth is a lot cheaper than it once was, but how that video player generates meaningful revenue isn’t obvious to me.
I’m aware. I’ve no problem with the membership plans per se, but using the video player as an “incentive” for membership doesn’t make sense to me. There’s other ways to incentivize membership that seem just fine. The video player seems weird to me, because it affects your costs, site performance, and might cause people to bounce the first time they ever visit the site and never have a chance to enter the sales funnel.
I’m sure there’s some conversion of that video into regular visitors, but is it meaningful?
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[1] Nothing against XPEL. My entire car has XPEL Ultimate 10 on it!
The only views those videos get are autoplays I would assume. No one in their right mind clicks random pop up videos anymore, or has for 10+ years. They should scrap the video and work on optimizing the website, which is the slowest loading website on the internet, by a significant amount.
Slowest loading website on the internet… you use.
Trust me, there’s slower, that have far more revenue. I would know, as they end up as clients of mine, at least for database performance optimization.
It could be worse in that it could just be random ads. Instead, it’s video content from this site directly. It’s user-hostile design nonetheless.
The video content isn’t served by the autopian. It could be a 8K 120fps imax extravaganza and it wouldn’t make a difference to the rest of the content.
Historically, it has generated a large amount of revenue for us. This year, it’s a little less. If you don’t click on a video, you’ll start seeing ads.
Good thing the web pivoted to video, eh? Right guys?
..guys?
I’m only the lowliest, filthiest Cloth Member but I’m happy to support a site that I read every day.
And I *will* be renewing.
Why am I cloth and not a higher tier? Because I’m not interested in the shirt or sticker or a grille badge. And I’m in the UK, so the delivery charge would be an extra expense. And I figure it’s better to give you something than give you nothing. So there.
The Autopian is the only website I pay a subscription to.
Ah – hopefully you might be able to answer a question or two then please? I’m a fellow UK viewer of the website and am tempted to join. Do you do an annual or monthly membership?
And do you charged an overseas transaction fee or can you use something like PayPal?
I did the annual fee, as it was cheaper.
$50 converted to around £38
i don’t recall how I paid, but I’m certain there were no fees for it being a different currency
Thank you.
Team – I don’t want to take you for granted, I love the site and you all work hard for it, I am a very happy subscriber who is getting a lot of great reads his bucks.
My ask for Santa: any chance we could get faster page loading times from The Autopian?
Yes! It’s on the list for 2026, probably by swapping JPEGs for .webp
It’s often slow (execution) of JS which makes a site slow. Not the loading of a dozen JPGs. The savings are minimal, the impact of loading and displaying a JPG pic, even near full screen ones, is fast, it is all the JS libraries and often the queue of many many requests to many many JS libs and small icons and what not, which makes page loading on (slower) devices slow. You can easily test this by throttling your connection using the web inspector in your browser and then reloading your page, without cache (and then again with cache filled with all the small files). You can then throttle to old 56k modem speeds to follow the loading process in detail.
I’ve been begging/offering to test the site for I think at least a year now :/
You’re spot on. It’s not images that are failing to load, it’s that *nothing* is fetched or rendered for several seconds sometimes. I say this as gently at I can, I don’t think this has quite gotten through to MH though.
Srsly if there were a QA membership tier where we test in exchange for membership, I’d sign up for that.
I know, I know, I know! I’m looping in our tech team on this.
Of course all of this is just gum flapping until we actually measure what’s going on 😀
Making a fast loading website is not particularly rocketscience . Especially if you did that kind of work for 20 years…
I agree, I was just pointing out we don’t know what’s slow until we measure it.
If this could also facilitate having enlarged pop-out images, please and thank you. I’ve notice SOME articles have them, rarely. The inline pictures are the right size for reading an article, but often I want to zoom in on details. I doubt my adblocker is causing this, though that’s always possible.
When that gets fixed, I’ll sub. Hold me to it, feel free to call me out when the changes go live. I can’t imagine I’ll be able to swing anything higher than Cloth, but I’ll do it.
I don’t think it is the images that are a problem.
I enjoy the high quality images you post here, makes it easy to zoom in.
Membership has its Privileges.
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American ExpressAutopianCompared to the recent trend of ”pay up or let us sell you”-popups, this type of civilized post/reminder is very good way to handle the need to get more paying souls. Thumbs up.
Also, the autopian tv element with the Murano CC on every(?) page gets repetitive. Maybe there could be some other content alternating as well? Or is it just me, haven’t clicked…
Fog light/blinker enthusiast? Will there be articles on this topic in the future? A friend is asking.
Yeah the video player is one thing — the “Autopian TV” insert in every article, regardless of relevance, is really just clutter.
Perhaps paid members should have an option to disable that
I watch PBS and listen to NPR. I don’t HAVE to pay for them, but I do. I want to retain the ability to do so.
I regularly read articles on the Autopian. I don’t HAVE to pay for it, but I do. Again, I want to retain the ability to do so.
Yep. I aggressively block ads everywhere possible.
But I also donate to NPR, Wikipedia, pay for Autopian membership, etc.
I think this is fair.