CarDomain and StreetFire, the no. 1 and no. 2 social networks for car enthusiasts, respectively, have merged. An announcement will be made later this morning. StreetFire CEO Glenn Rogers will run the combined entity, although CarDomain is the acquiring company and has a majority of the equity. CarDomain founder and Chairman Alex Algard will become Chairman of the combined entity. The companies will continue to maintain separate offices, Seattle for CarDomain and Los Angeles for StreetFire.
CarDomain was funded entirely by Algard. StreetFire has taken two rounds of financing totalling nearly $8 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Jeremy Liew, the Lightspeed partner who led those investments, will take a board seat at the combined entity.
The companies cater to car enthusiasts which are for the most part men between 16-30. Comscore shows relatively flat growth over the last year for both sites – 3.2 million monthly uniques worldwide for CarDomain, and 1.1 million for StreetFire. The companies say their internal Google Analytics show about 5 million uniques combined for the company, after removing estimated duplicate audience. WidgetFire also has a video widget that reaches another 4 million or so unique visitors a month via sites that have embedded it.
Both companies have gone through layoffs in the last year. CarDomain has trimmed staff to a dozen from fifty employees a year ago. StreetFire has also let about 8 staff go, and is also currently at a dozen employees. The companies say no further layoffs are needed and expects to hit profitability this summer.
Michael… that’s a very stylish car you got there
Wonder if this is a trend we’ll see with all the smaller niche social networks as the economy goes through this hard time.
Follow me @ http://twitter.com/IanMikutel
yeah i like to roll in style.
although my real car is a honda pilot with a dented door and a lot of dog hair.
Congratulations. When I was into cars, I had a profile page on CarDomain and learned a lot about the hobby.
This is very smart. More and more branded companies will merge if their services complement each other because it can help create a stronger impression for the consumer.
Check out dreamgarage.com
I forgot to add that it’s where all the cool kids are now going: dreamgarage.com
You can open a free My Dream Garage account and save all the vehicles that make up your dream garage.
There are also amazing private collections on the site with the profiles on the entrepreneurs behind them.
streetfire is a social network? Isn’t it the youtube for car guys?
If you build it someone will come.. everytime someone tell me oh !! that idea is a crap I always say you dont know till its out …
for evidence there are plenty to look at
If only I had a car I could talk about…
I am in this industry and let me just say that it is very very saturated. Internet Brands, Autoforums.com, CarSpace (deadpool?) and hundreds of small niche networks like this network for exotics: http://www.thed...versnetwork.com
Where can I find a list of all of the niche social networks out there from a ranking perspective?
CarDomain and StreetFire, the no. 1 and no. 2 social networks for car enthusiasts – is there such a list?
According to ComScore, AutoForums is bigger than both Streetfire and CarDomain….
So make that #2 and #3 largest….
Of course you would be dumb enough to think ComScore is somehow a relevant indicator. How many 18 – 35 males do you think are part of ComScore’s sample population? If you truly have 9.7 million monthly uniques that you claim on yoru homepage then yes you are bigger.
However, I’m willing to bet that is “Visits” so your Visitor count is probably near 1.6 million? That is less than CarDomain’s 2.5 million and StreetFire’s 6.2 million (across all their sites) and 1.6 million on just streetfire.net.
Try again.
Have you ever seen a Comscore report?
Probably not.
You will see AutoForums is way ahead of both Streetfire.net and CarDomain in terms of unique visitors per month, and pageviews per month.
@AutoForums, I participate in a couple of your network sites but your top site has under 250K uniques. Outside of the slice of valuable content a majority of your traffic comes from off-topic and for sale posts. You can add that up all you want but that wont cut it to play ball as a top media site.
When it comes to community based auto enthusiast sites I would like to see a site with larger reach than cardomain.com with out the padding of worthless off-topic chatter that advertisers wont touch.
You mean one of those ComScore Marketer reports or My Media Metrix? Let me guess, your username looks something like amf_flastname, you get an occasional email from cMediametrix@comscore.com when data is released. Sound familiar? Oh, who looks like the dumbass now?
Go ahead and keep running your business based on bad data. Doesn’t bother me.
By the way, this IS a TECHNOLOGY site that HEAVILY covers Silicon Valley and the WEB. It’s pretty safe to assume a lot of its readers are… um… in the same circle and probably know a few things about things like ComScore, Hitwise etc.
Also, great job on your brand management!
from what i understand cardomain was one of the first social networks ever created.
I have known about this one for a while and not too sure how I feel about it. I don’t really see the benefit or cost savings going on if they are both maintaining full staffs, not merging offices, etc…
I’m interested to see what feature enhancements this will bring. I’ve been working on http://www.motostew.com for a while now. Similar niche but integrated a e-commerce referral program. Should be up soon.