2022 is nearly here, and yet the online automobile publishers’ methods towards car marketing remain unchanged - that is, of course, except for CarExpert. This news outlet for anything car-related primarily issues reviews that it regards as being of the highest level of impartiality, unlike their competitors.

The orthodox approach of the industry is for such publishers to accept sponsorship deals from major car companies in return for a favourable review of their latest releases and a littering of advertisements throughout their editorials. This results in a piece that is bloated with sponsored material; one that devalues the story it’s trying to tell and leaves a bad taste in the mouths of its readers. CarExpert is hoping to elucidate why this is a thing of the past.

Who Is CarExpert?

Founded by Paul Maric, Alborz Fallah and Anthony Crawford in 2020, CarExpert is a maverick online automotive publisher. Since the business’s founding in the midst of COVID, it has raised over $6 million in capital, with several billionaires and business leaders on the share register.

The site has expanded to become Australia’s fastest growing publication relating to cars, and is also the host of the country’s most watched automotive car review channel on YouTube. The company is currently estimated to have a valuation of around $25 million, and plans to list on the stock market within the next two years.

However, none of these feats are considered the company’s biggest achievements in the eyes of its founders. Having launched their mean viable product (MVP) in early 2020, the automotive industry suffered a huge regression in demand as a result of COVID; the lack of spending during the pandemic forced the founders to rethink their approach.

Deciding their approach was not focussed enough, they conceptualised an experience centre to bolt on to their publishing business. This appeared to do the trick, and is the company’s proudest achievement as it allowed them to secure the funding they needed to weather the storm of COVID.

The ‘CarExpert Experience Centre’ was trialled earlier this year and proved to be a huge success: over 35,000 people visited this brand-agnostic retail space during its three month trial located at Westfield Warringah Mall on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. The secret for the centre’s success is the ethos it shares with CarExpert’s website: an authentic experience in which customers are not pressured with advertising.

CarExpert’s Approach

CarExpert’s approach has always remained the same: to provide an authentic and unbiased experience in an industry dominated with reviews bloated with advertising and marketing. The presence of these devalues the story the outlet is trying to tell, and creates a strong sense of sponsored material and prevents readers from enjoying their love for buying a new car.

CarExpert co-founder Paul Maric asserts that by making this a problem for the readers, it creates a negative feedback loop of problems for the company as well. Furthermore, readers will be dissuaded from following contextual links to the car being reviewed (as the review clearly feels paid for), leading to less revenue earned per click through.

Alternatively, CarExpert suggests authentic and genuine reviews ; they never put out content that has been paid for by brands as it is entirely useless (and even detrimental) to them. Instead of focusing on running display ads on their website, CarExpert has worked earnestly to be the first search result for every major car in Australia thanks to targeted and highly effective SEO.

Refusing to run ads on the website has even more positive benefits as the website loads faster without them. Moreover, since online advertisements must first be loaded on a third party website, which takes up time, their absence allows CarExpert’s website to run faster and smoother; the end result is a product that feels more polished than its competitors.

Closing Remarks

Put briefly, CarExpert’s success reflects a truth that is almost holistically true in all aspects of life: that hard work will result in greater heights of success, even if taking the easy way out provides gains in the short-term. Moreover, the work the founders had to put in initially to ensure their reviews returned as the first result in Google consistently could have felt fruitless, but paved the way for their later success.

This gave them the bargaining power to allow their passion and knowledge to shine through their reviews without the need for sponsored content to generate revenue. Instead, by becoming necessary to car manufacturers due to their influence, CarExpert is essentially paid for more people to visit their website. This approach has very evidently played a huge part in their success, a fact CarExpert is hoping to preach