I’m Glad I Didn’t Sell LTT, BIGTIME 

RU-vidrs sponsoring other RU-vidrs sounds like the kind of culture I'd love to see

"Bought by private equity" ... and there it is, the downfall of anything good.

I was watching a Donut video and one of the host casually mentioned that project cars are no longer allowed at the Donut office/garage. That was the day I was basically finished with their content.

I believe that their trip to Australia and seeing how MCM operates was one of the big driving forces behind their departure. A great example to follow!

I was an avid DONUT Media watcher years ago and it was obvious when they were bought. The content changed from educational to 'we bought the worst bla bla bla products, do they work' videos. It was more algorithm focus rather than car passion videos.

Luke says no one complained. People were complaining. Pick literally any Donut video and someone will be asking for Bumper to Bumper or Up To Speed or one of their other old formats. Check out any of their car reviews recently and people have been pointing out that it's basically advertisement. People have definitely noticed that something is wrong a long time ago.

If you browse the subreddit, there have been people complaining about the declining quality of Donut videos for as long as I can remember honestly, not just after the recent events

"people weren't pointing this out til now" Donuts community has been extremely vocal about the lost soul of donut for 2 years. I'm not sure how much you dug into community discourse prior to this news

LTT collab: "I spent 100 hours in Canada's underground car scene"

We're glad you didn't sell too

That dude in blue had a pretty good take on it where, to sum it up, when you are a up and coming YT channel (team or solo) you are more willing to take risks that are related to what your channel presents/invests/writes. Where as with private equity buying a brand - they are just trying to fund and keep up what was already built with the risk, and therefor - taking *further risks is not really something you're going to see. When the original "risk takers" in the case of a team stick around - you start to see the inception of "stuck in a box" , and then you get things like Donut - Bigtime.

Watching someone slowly put a Jenga tower back together is unironically a fantastic way to maintain my attention span.

lukes jenja is like having subway surfers in the corner for retention

Donut went from being one of the greatest automotive channels doing all sorts of fun stuff to being basically a reaction channel with a few episodes of big projects sprinkled in between. B2B was such a great series.

Its so sick to hear Linus and Luke be psyched for Bigtime, more cross-over car content with actual car channels would be rad.

Roosterteeth is a prime example of when u get bought out you lose touch of your community

Hoonigan showed all acquisition companies what corporate management can do to car channels

Bigtime needs their own ScrapyardWars series sponsored by LTT.... for the memes :D

Car media dying thanks to corporate buyouts, Hoonigan, donut, Car Throttle in the UK, all ruined by buyouts.

I was part of a company that sold to a private equity firm or something along those lines. We were told nothing would change. Things changed immediately and got worse and worse and worse. I left during Covid and that once successful company is now struggling to survive.

Shocking. I left my fav company after “growth above all else” poisoned the place.

Private equity is a blight on humanity

Rooster Teeth survived their initial corporate takeover, but after Warner came in, everything went to shit. It also didn’t help that they had several major controversies involving weird sexual behavior and abuse by a few employees and discrimination charges leveled towards executives by several former employees. I miss the good ol’ days of that channel. They were probably my first subscription on RU-vid way back in the day because I watched Red vs. Blue on their website.

Linus, there's 1 rule of thumb you need to remember when it comes to acquisitions - are you ready and willing to walk away at a moments notice? If the answer is yes, sell it and hope things go well, but be prepared to walk away when your promised control goes away. If the answer is no, DO NOT SELL. That's the unfortunate nature of business. If you built a business and you aren't ready to quit, walk away, retire, etc and you take an acquisition offer based on (often) false promises thinking it'll help you create a product/brand you could otherwise only dream about, you're guaranteed to get burned badly. Too many brands take the buyout offer and ultimately realize serious mistakes were made. There are a few stories where a bad sale turns into a good move in the long run, like Portnoy buying Barstool back for $1*, but those are few and far between.

"In the end - maybe it wasn't the corporate inflation & Q2 profits we subscribed for" Sun Tzu, the art of corporate channel governance c.1508

Operating a company solely for growth to create return on investment is a cancer: it's ridiculous that a consistently profitable company is no longer good enough. Don't sell, stay private.

I don't think it's the down fall of a channel, it's just how stuff is supposed to work. Construction trades, production companies, all kinds of industries, someone starts as an employee, gets experience and then starts their own venture so they can run it the way they want to. It's how an industry is supposed to grow.

Luke just looking at the views as if that's the only indicator of them doing well. People HAVE been complaining about them cutting beloved series and focused on trend chasing or "viral" formats that would garner a wider viewer base while forsaken what made people love it in the first place. YES, it has been around 3 years, but not all acquisitions cause IMMEDIATE noticeable turnover. SMOSH was with DEFY Media until it was defunct (around 7 years ago), but during that time they still had high viewer count and people complained about a lot of their videos feeling like they were trend chasing. They admitted to being forced to produce stuff they didn't care for, not allowed to produce stuff they wanted to try or if it was allowed, heavily altered. SMOSH would unlikely to have survived if it wasn't for Ian doing his damnedest to keep it alive. Rooster Teeth was bought by Fullscreen (around 10 years ago), and they still had high viewer count for many years after their acquisition. The turnover in personalities, plus the constant scandals, alienating their audience, degrading comments to anyone who criticized them, mismanagement from both Rooster Teeth and Fullscreen and whichever overlord they had at the time took the whole company down, but it took a lot for that to happen as well as taking years for it to collapse. If they had more of the original founders, hosts, and talents, they might have had the chance to survive. 3 years is NOTHING when it comes to what an acquisition can do to a channel/company, especially if it's focused on likeable hosts and personalities. So the fact it has been 3 years and that's supposed to mean the acquisition went well? There are plenty of cascading effects that as an audience we won't see and may never see. And perhaps the shows can carry themselves, but maybe not if people are more interested in hosts which tends to be the case.

People had been pointing out the substantial drop in quality in Donut videos for a LOOONG time. My friends and I used to wait for every episode of Money Pit S1 and other old series (RIP Science Garage), but then eventually all those project formats that took a lot of time and effort in research and production got replaced with reactions, tier lists, and such quick turnover, mainstream, profitability-oriented videos. Over time the majority of uploads from the channel just got increasingly stale. Sure they must have kept growing because these videos reach a broader audience but they lost engagement from a lot of long term subscribers who came for the nerdy grease monkey stuff found other channels that made the content we wanted to see more of from Donut. The first video from BigTime seems to have that old Money Pit/Hi-Low charm and I'm all here for it.

The Donut Daily Drag Race video has to be the perfect analogy for the situation. Donut cast we all know and love show up to a drag strip with their cool dailies with history and personality, when suddenly some rando from corporate who NO ONE (not even regular Donut viewers) knows about shows up in his base model Tesla and completely sucks ALL the fun out of the video.

This reminds me of when Motortrend got acquired, they ended some shows and now only Roadkill/Roadkill garage resemble what they were previously. I was stoked when Mike Finnegan, Tony Angelo and Lucky Costa started their own RU-vid channels.

What’s cool is that not only Donut let them do the new channel announcement, that allowed the BigTime channel to get about 300k subs in two days. The first video they posted about the announcement got almost a million views in the first 24 hours. That is what is amazing. A brand new channel, that many views and subs in such a short time just doesn’t happen unless it’s a second channel for an already established channel. If they were not able to get the announcement out in Donut, they would still be trying to a couple thousand subs.

Donut was really fun for a while and then it nose dived into super clickbaity garbage

Big Time has 1.2 million subs and they only have two videos on their channel. amazing

I was not ready to hear about this, awesome for you to support other creators!

The episode I never expected lol. Love the donut crew and have been watching you guys for YEARS

How interesting 3 years ago? That's around the time I noticed a difference and reduced my viewing of donut. I used to watch all their vids but that's around the time I noticed a change. They also got rid of science garage, up to speed and bumper2bumper, my bread and butter for their channel.

Someone else brought up that the US just recently negated non-compete clauses - that was potentially what tipped the scales and allowed them to move on immediately

they were already a corporate-owned channel from the jump, it was just much more creator driven content under the earlier management

Donut's community has been talking about the soul being gone for a while now. Everyone misses Money Pit. The new truck is kinda like it but not really and there was a biiiiig void there for a long time. I personally could see the problems described by the BigTime guys before the news broke. There's a similar thing happening to Joshua Weissman even though there wasn't a corporate takeover as far as I know

Same thing happened with Fitment Industries YT channel as well a while ago, Alex and Dakota left and became independent. The Fitment Industries channel is basically dead now. Donut still has great people there so hopefully it wont go belly up.

The F1 channel/podcast WTF1 was, fairly early on, acquired by a bigger company. A year and a half ago, the founder and one of the other main hosts left and started their own channel and podcast (P1 with Matt and Tommy) which has gotten *much* bigger than things ever were at WTF1, with international live shows, shows on the big stages at races, etc. Their departure video on the original WTF1 channel was removed shortly after being put up, and they've talked about how limited they were at WTF1. Interesting ideas would get shot down, and from my perspective some of the RU-vid content was pointless filler. Things can also move the other way. Collegehumor was not doing well, people were getting laid off, it has been losing money for a while I believe. One of the higher-up people at that division (still very beholden to the media overlords) put in an offer to buy it, and it's not apparently profitable as Dropout. IIRC the new owner/CEO has talked about how there used to be pressure to chase trends to grow, instead of just establishing a good revenue stream and having slow sustainable growth.

so cool to see media in a different category talk about another category i also enjoy, never thought in a million years that lmg would be discussing donut or bigtime

As a long time donut fan, there was a massive shift almost immediately after the buyout, and there have been comments on most videos about the issues. It literally felt like the hosts had the life drained out of them overnight.

The folks at BigTime where in a Rush... A Big Time Rush

Jeremiah and Jobe were my two favorite hosts on Donut. I would LOVE to see Justin and Nolan bug out and join them, too. I love those 4 guys.

15:56 I’m really glad you brought this up Linus. There’s a whole nother side to it that we maybe don’t see. The point you made of the corporate overhead of admin and working requirements is something that doesn’t always align with passion projects is a really good one. Maybe the two guys just want to work on passion projects and don’t care about money as much anymore? And the company is like we can’t do that here sadly because of the admin stuff. Then shouting out the new channel on their channel is a huge sign that the company doesn’t hold any negative feelings towards the two starting their own thing together and that’s really nice to see

My company was bought out by a private equity company and they did us really good. We are a hybrid, construction manufacturing plant. The acquisition got us lower insurance rates better benefits, and more PTO. And it’s been like that for years. Unfortunately our private equity company was bought out by a publicly traded corporation and things seem to be on the downfall. 20 hour plus mandatory overtime a week, a through put rate above the capacity of the facility and storage grounds.

Acquisition changes aren't made overnight. It takes a long time analyze the current operation and then spend time afterwards to muck it up.

The crossover I wouldn’t have ever thought of

Really awesome of you to reach out to those guys and throw them a bone as a sponsorship. Good RU-vidrs taking care of other Good RU-vidrs as others have said in the comments should be a more common thing.

MKBHD survived acquisition by Apple

The issue I and many others have had with donut is that the videos they made over the past years have went from well researched and unique content that’s educational to “let’s react to car products from TEMU!” A similar thing happened to hoonigan not too long ago, where they went from making varied quality content to basically they’ve only made This vs That and the occasional update on Lia Block’s racing career for almost the past year. Both channels still get a good amount of traffic, but the actual hype around the brands has completely fizzled out.

The Brazil video that Jobe hosted was absolutely incredible, I look forward to them getting to that pevel

Selling is what killed off rooster teeth

Anyone who's been watching Donut since the beginning could see the transition after the acquisition. I started watching less and less of Donut over the last 3 years.

Great perspective, thanks for sharing!!!

Thank you for doing this it needed to be said

Donut still do some legitimately good stuff; the Baja Ranger build, the Laguna Seca lawsuit video, the Suzuki X90 restoration road trip, etc. But then half or more of their videos now are listicles and game shows. I do think there's still a spark of something great but the BS is drowning it out more and more

Donut addressed a bit of this in their recent big three podcast as well but never mentioned anything about James yet

LTT and Donut is a crossover I did not expect.

I didnt knew much about Donut before, my friend is more into car scene and we watched the Brasil tour (as a Brazilian myself) I LOVED that content! Hope to see more of that on the Big Time channel

I don't think I have ever seen a channel go over a million subs so fast. And the massive views on the first vid. The chemistry was incredible and you can see the passion. I hope they do decide to take Linus up on the collab.

Same thing happened with Hoonigan. They got bought out by Wheel Pros, and a lot of members left within a year or two. Not to mention the death of Ken Block. RU-vid channels getting bought out never ends well.

Agree completely that the fact donut let them shout out their new page is very unappreciated by people. A channel getting corporate isn’t new but a corporate company allowing something they are not attached too to be shouted out is very new and mad respect for it. Big time got a million subs in a few days probably because of the shoutout

Regarding the point that they were bought 2-3 years ago, so this change/departure definitely couldn't've been related... I've been involved in some way or another with 6 companies that were bought out. At all of them, it took 2-4 years for the sht to hit the fan from the buy out and things to really start to crumble. Often in those situations, for many people still there, it had become a labour of love and it takes them time to get over it enough to move on. Then, once one or two people do, mass exodus often ensues over the next year or two.

The negative comments didn't just start after Zach and Jer left. The Big Time announcement video basically confirmed what a lot of people have already suspected. Donut subscribers had long since noticed that Donut's "car reviews" were basically informercials.

They definitely pulled punches.

I'm kind of surprised to see this come up on the show. I love LTT and Big Time hosts, and I'm excited to see what comes.

15:26 it would be awesome if LTT had some sort of grant program that allowed employees to use LTT assets (like filming equipment) as well as a small amount of money so the employees could create passion projects in their free time. So instead of telling them they can’t work on a passion project, you tell them they can use LTT facilities and a small budget to work on this project in their free time, and then it gets uploaded to a separate channel that’s affiliated with but not owned by LTT. Then the ad revenue would go towards a fund to keep those projects going. I’m not sure how you could set it up so that it’s not people working overtime and more people doing hobbies but giving employees that freedom could lead to some really awesome videos.

Man I hate "growth" some executive wants to activate clauses in his contracts and trades the long term stability of the business for it

Similar to what happened to WTF1 where the two main hosts left to do their own Chanel P1. Almost no views now ob the old one and the new one exploded in popularity

“You need to ‘Big Time’ respond to your emails.” 😂

The first actual video big time put out was the exact video I wanted to see and jerry and jobe were my favorite hosts by far.

Yes. They pulled punches. One of the creative team that left Donut made a more in depth video. AutoTea is the name of the channel. Basically, the new management made the cost structure of Donut so top heavy, that the management did what management does. They asked the creative team to do more with less, didn't understand how to incentivize creatives, stopped taking risks with content and stopped listening to the people who built what they bought.

If it’s like any company I worked for that was bought out. They say it won’t change but after a year small changes start. Those add up to make huge changes.

If LTT sold we would never get the return of Scrapyard wars. Change my mind.

I'll never understand how a company buys another company because it's successful, but then tries to change the company

Zach and Jobe are in , my opinion, the best hosts donut had, and a lot of their first build series is what brought me to follow donut. As it stands right now, I dont see a reason to continue to following donut as most of their content is just bland and uninspired

"It was sick, I'd do it again." Luke is such a CHAD

Anytime a VC company buys a small company, you may as well plan to leave within 2 years. It always starts off slow with changes, but it ramps up fast once they want a bigger return on money and the small company feel gets crushed.

Not sure if it's different in the media space than home service space, but it took about 5 years for the large corporate entity to really start having its fingerprints on things

in a rich man’s house there is no place to spit but his face.

Why do I feel around the 15 min mark. Linus is thinking of this Years April Fools Video and the Tiger King. "I'm never going to financially recover from this"

Jer and Zach were two of my favorite hosts so I’m glad they went together

BRO! I would absolutely LOVE to see LTT sponsor Zach and Jeremiah!

Yeah lets fuck!ng go, both of my favorite channels ''together''. Btw I agree with Luke, as a Brazilian 100 hours in Brazil car underground scene was a awesome video

Sourcefed was a slow death brought on by corporate pressure, but there sister channel Sourced Nerd happened literally overnight. The channel was bought by NowThis Media from the company that bought sourcefed, and NowThis literally fired all the hosts and writers and cancelled all the content they were producing. Replacing all the talent with new no-names that nobody cared about. And all this happened literally overnight. Like there was a Sourcefed Nerd News video one day, and NowThis drops the "we enacted a hostile takeover of this channel" bombshell the very next day. Years later, Joe Beretta and a couple other hosts revealed that they weren't given any more lead time than the audience was. They had a staff meeting towards the end of the work day and there corporate overlords told them to go home and don't come back the day before the big reveal.

I think Jobe and Jer said it best: donut was started by car enthusiasts, not car experts. They came in expecting a lot more professionals and experienced technicians, but that became them, and they were underpaid for what they brought to the table. It was always a kitschy channel when they weren’t involved, and now they’re bringing a channel that focuses (presumably, we haven’t seen much yet) on builds and hands mechanic work, where their respective backgrounds align. And yes, back in the day, they used to have that cool dude in the kitchen set that explained to me half my knowledge of how cars work, but where did he go? Love that guy

I only got into Donut this last year, but went through their back catalog too. My biggest complaint about Donut today is the repetition of content with fewer interesting/unique videos like underground scenes like mentioned. But I felt the soul of the creators were still there, and at times better than some of the content from 2020 which, for understandable reasons, felt much flatter for me. I'm honestly looking forward to both channels

Damn Great on Ya Linus! Never Shill out please we love your passion project!!

There is a bingo card in existence that had the WAN show talking about donut

Mad respect for them....they don't even have to do this but for the sake of people back home You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

The keeping your employees from overworking themselves part of the clip was really nice to hear. I have no way to verify it, but I hope it's true.

oh nice!!! that is a great idea about sponsoring BIGTIME! good job Linus!

RIP DONUT & HOONIGAN

Id be interested to see what sort of crossover a channel like bigtime and ltt has and what sort of sponsorship deal would make sense

The cross over here is incredible. Happy to see the camaraderie.

Same thing happened to Matt and Tommy from WTF1. Some corporation bought them, changed the way they were doing things and they left and started their own thing.

Venture capitalism will be the ruin of everything people create for fun.