DISCLAIMERS: I’ve told this story in bits and pieces; here’s my attempt to tell it completely. Everything you will read is my opinion; if I call someone a “goat fucker” it doesn’t mean I saw them fucking a goat. Not all of it is my story to tell, so there are parts I will leave out. By and large, however, I believe this is what you’ve been waiting to read.
On Friday, September 19, 2009, I received an email from Ed Niedermeyer titled “This is your captain speaking…” It informed me and twenty-one other contributors that the founder of The Truth About Cars, Robert Farago, was “leaving” and that his position would be taken by Niedermeyer, known as “Ed” to everyone but his father, who insisted on calling him “Ted” and never explained why.
The story thus far: Robert Farago founded TTAC for reasons he can tell you himself, being a reader here. He sold it to a company called NameMedia, which was supposed to promote it more heavily and allow him to pay his contributors; most of them, self included, wrote for free at the time. I’d come on board at the recommendation of my friend and boon companion Jonny Lieberman, whom I’d followed from a crummy little gimmick site called “Autofiends”.
(A description of my entry into the autowriting business, and various scandalous aspects of that entry, is here.)
NameMedia couldn’t make TTAC pay, so they sold it to VerticalScope, hereafter “VS”. I will go to my grave not understanding how VS worked. The company was founded by a basement-dwelling nerd who borrowed money to buy various automotive-and-other-special-interest forums. VS would go on to acquire hundreds of forums, using venture capital. I was told more than once by a senior VS executive that they made up every single traffic and engagement number they ever communicated to investors. They already owned a general-interest car site called AutoGuide.com, which recycled press releases and sucked balls, not necessarily in that order. So TTAC was meant to be their “prestige” offering. The idea was that they would never sell advertising on TTAC as an individual product. Rather, you’d get it as a bonus if you did enough advertising on the forums and on the remarkably feckless AutoGuide, run at the time by a genial nonentity named Colum Wood.
Ed Niedermeyer came on at TTAC in 2008 to work with Robert, around the time I did. He was described to me by people who knew him beforehand as a small-time pot dealer in Portland with a dad who was a small-time slum lord. The truth of these statements can be left to the reader to determine. He was young, smart, and hideously ambitious. He was also very good at understanding the VerticalScope leadership, and had multiple conversations with them sans Robert. At the end of those conversations, Robert was fired and Ed was put in his place. When I heard the truth behind Ed’s “captain” email, I quit.