When I created Indie Auto I did not want to join the viral rat race, where the website that gets the highest number of page views supposedly “wins.” That might bring in more revenue for those websites which sell advertising, but being the most popular can often correlate with dishing out the most gratuitous clickbait. That said, I write to be read, so I take into account what Indie Auto readers most gravitate to when prioritizing what stories to run.
Now that we’ve reached the end of the year I thought I would share with you Indie Auto’s top 20 most popular posts in 2023. These are ranked by number of page views. It’s true that we have a few more days to go before New Year’s, but I’m not expecting much, if any, shifting around. Take a look at the list and do share your reactions:
- Six mistakes that killed the AMC Pacer — and American Motors
- DeBest ad for the 1981 Pontiac Trans Am that was never printed
- What’s Collectible Automobile’s beef with the 1978-80 Pontiac Grand Prix?
- 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme: Monument to a fading dream
- Why did Mitsubishi fail in the United States?
- 1954 Packard Clipper: The car that ended the automaker’s independence
- Defective 1977-79 Continental Mark V showed how Lincoln lost its way
- 1948 Hudson ‘step-down’ was a brilliant car with tragic flaws
- Four reasons why the AMC Gremlin was a bad idea
- 1965-68 GM big cars: The end of different strokes
- Rambler pays price for not listening to Car and Driver magazine
- 1963-65 Buick Riviera shows GM’s struggle with personal coupes
- 1970 Pontiac Firebird: Time to go on a diet
- 1969-71 Chrysler: An Exner idea fumbled again
- 1961-63 Rambler American: Would it have been better without a restyling?
- The 10 worst single-year redesigns of postwar American cars
- The 1964-65 Lincoln Continental was a step backward rather than forward
- 1968 Chrysler New Yorker: The peak of ‘peak Chrysler?’
- 1968 full-sized Mercury: A pioneer of brougham was overshadowed
- Ford gets back into the mid-sized game with redesigned 1966 Fairlane
Certain types of histories dwarfed other content
The thing I find most striking is that none of the top-20 posts involve current events. I continue to write these kind of stories because I think they are important, but I do so with the acknowledgement that most Indie Auto readers apparently prefer historical pieces.
A similar situation exists for book and media reviews. Substantive critiques — as opposed to glorified press releases — are a dying breed in the automotive media, so I write them even though few read them and even fewer find them worth commenting on.
Among automakers, stories about domestics mostly generate far more readership than foreign models. This year General Motors and AMC dominated the top-20 list. In previous years, articles about Chrysler and Studebaker ranked much higher. However, the all-time-most-read Indie Auto post continues to be about the AMC Pacer — by a country mile.
Why? I have no idea. Any thoughts?
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