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When I made the decision to start sharing news-related updates on Detailed I was worried there wouldn’t be much content for me to cover each week. It turns out that the opposite is true — I’m finding it hard to keep up.
In the last hour it has been announced that Motorsport Network Media and their 50+ websites have been acquired by GMF Capital.
There are essentially two arms to the Motorsport business. One is their gaming arm which produces titles like Nascar Rivals and Nascar Heat for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and more.
This gaming arm is actually a public company ($MSGM), and not part of today’s announcement.
Today’s acquisition (which involves a controlling majority stake and an option to purchase the remaining minority share) involves flagship websites in the automotive world.
I currently track 13 sites for the acquired Motorsport Network Media which include:
- Motorsport.com
- Autosport.com
- Motor1
- Inside EVs
- duPont Registry
- Motorsport Tickets
- Motorsport Stats
- Ferrari Chat
According to third party data from the likes of Similarweb (all traffic sources) and Ahrefs (search engine traffic), Motorsport.com is definitely the biggest site in the network.
Similarweb, which has Google Analytics tracking on the site, says it reached 32.1M total visits last month.
All announcements regarding today’s deal state the combined network of sites reach 40M+ unique visitors and have a reach of 15 million social media followers.
This number is actually quite a bit lower than what is currently stated on the Motorsport Network homepage, so I will just assume that hasn’t been updated for a while:
I always thought Ferrari Chat was pretty special as the rise in Facebook Groups and Reddit communities have meant forums aren’t as popular today as they once were. It’s nice to see that site is still going strong.
Over 14 million posts have been made there and new ones are being added every few minutes.
Still, my 13 sites tracked is way off the dozens I claimed in the headline of this article, so what’s going on?
Where Are Motorsport Network Media’s 50+ Websites?
I was a bit confused in today’s announcement to see Forbes state that MSNM has over 50 flagship automotive websites.
I purposefully don’t track all websites I find for a brand – I generally exclude sites which aren’t in English or are just corporate landing pages – but my 13 is a few dozen short.
Well, it turns out I had never made a connection to Haymarket, another media company I track, actually being owned by Motorsport Network Media.
I track exactly 49 websites for Haymarket, so that would definitely make up the numbers.
Motorsport Network Media definitely acquired Haymarket back in 2016, as confirmed by countless reports around the web. It’s just surprising to me that I’ve never made the connection, and they don’t seem to clearly make it themselves.
Besides that acquisition 7 years ago, the Motorsport Network website doesn’t have a single mention of Haymarket on it.
Haymarkets website doesn’t have any mention of the Motorsport Network besides a single sentence on their history page, which hasn’t been updated since 2019.
If this ownership is still in place then Motorsport Network Media own a lot of websites that have nothing to do with the automotive space, like Asian Investor and Windpower Monthly.
I love how no matter how in-depth and detailed my tracking is now across 150+ media brands there are still new connections to make. The internet feels a little bit smaller every day.
No Financials Were Revealed, But The New Owner is Confident About Growing the Sites
Trust me when I say I know updates like this would be a lot more interesting if we knew how much money the sites were making and how much they sold for.
Nobody else reporting on this news is sharing those details, and I don’t have them myself.
Still, via Forbes we can see that GMF Capital founder Gary Fegel is confident in growing their reach.
He said,
You know, we are not buying this to keep status quo, right? We’re buying it to grow the business.The US market is kind of underserved; only like 15% of traffic is in the United States which is hard to believe. It should be way, way higher given the interest in the last few years.
Note that I merged two separate quotes together there.
Fegel also made a number of comments about how Formula One is a growing sport and he thinks there’s the opportunity for them to reach a lot more of that audience online as well.
I’m curious if we’ll see other digital media goliaths getting into the F1 content game, just like we saw with electric vehicle news sites, the gardening niche and others.
Watch this space.
