In 2011, Tim Carroll set out to build the ultimate care image library on the internet. He spent the better part of a year assembling an automotive database with nearly every year, make and model in history.
Today, Boldride.com has 212,000 car photos for 14,000 different automobiles, but the site is much more than car porn. It has evolved into a destination for car enthusiasts looking for news and automotive storytelling, which helps the site stand out in a crowded space, Carroll said.
"We have the year, make and model of any car imaginable. The site has beautiful car pictures." Carroll said. "But we have really excellent storytelling. We're finding interesting stories and providing a unique perspective."
An example of that was when Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker died last November in a car accident. As other sites wrote about the hard news and profiled Walker's life, Boldride took a different approach by writing about all of the cars Walker had in his garage. With a respectful tone, the website detailed each vehicle Walker owned, and it became the No 1. most read article in the site's history, Carroll said.
"It was a different take in a very competitive space," he said.
Boldride's viewership grew from 1/4 million unique visitors a month when the site first started to 1.5 million uniques today, Carroll said. The site has three full-time writers and three other rotating freelancers. Boldride makes its revenue from advertising on this site, which Carroll said has so far been successful due to the demographic it attracts (male, 25-54, $100K salary). Carroll is based in Chicago but his team is all over the country. He has a business parter in New York, a tech team in L.A., and writers across the U.S.
In the future, Carroll wants to develop more original video content on the site and expanded Boldride's content to include more stories on planes, boats, motorcycles, drones and anything that has an engine and that may be of interest to its fans.
But as new viewers come to the site for car news and storytelling, they stick around for Boldride's bread and butter: the car library.
"Our primary goal was to create an ultimate library of cars," he said. "We want people to be able to find everything and get lost in enjoying car images."
Screengrab via Boldride.com
