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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Archive for the ‘cars’ category
07.08.2022
Ever since we had to reset the counter for Autocade in March, because of a new server and a new version of Mediawiki, itâs been interesting to see which pages are most popular.
The old ranking took into account everything from March 2008 to March 2022. With everything set to zero again, I can now see whatâs been most popular in the last few months.
Some of the top 20 were among the top pages before March 2022, but whatâs surprising is whatâs shot up into the top slots.
Over the course of half a day on Friday GMT, the Toyota Corolla (E210) page found itself as the top page, home page excepting. And the Kia Morning (TA) page shot up out of nowhere recently, too.
I know our page on the Corolla is number one on Mojeek for a search of that model but that canât be the only reason itâs done so well. I havenât studied the referrer data. A shame that link: no longer works on search engines.

Corolla fans, thank you for your extra 6,000 page views! Itâs helped our overall total, but the viewing rate is still down at 2019 levels thanks to the collapse of the Bing index, and the search engines that itâs taken down with them.
I almost feel Iâve shot myself in the foot for promoting Duck Duck Go so much since 2010! But then I hopefully spared a lot of people from being tracked (as much) by the big G.
Tags: 2022, Autocade, Bing, JY&A Media, Mediawiki, Mojeek, publishing, statistics, Toyota Posted in cars, interests, internet, media, New Zealand, publishing, technology | No Comments »
02.08.2022

Weâve hit 4,600 models on Autocade, with the Toyota Will VS taking us to this point, but the stats show we are sitting on 1,180,548 views. We have to get to 1,352,989 on the new count before I can announce weâve reached 29 million page views.
Weâre looking at the lowest traffic on Autocade since 2019, and Iâm sure the collapse of the Bing index, taking down the indices of all associated search engines (Duck Duck Go, Qwant, etc.), is to blame. I used to see an increase of 100,000 every week, roughly, but not these days. (PS.: I was still observing this level when we first switched the site over, and the slower growth has probably coincided with when WorldWideWebSize.com recorded Bing’s plummet in late Mayâearly June.)
Autocade is the one site where we never changed the set-up, other than hosting provider and Mediawiki version. The other sites had various things done to them, with Cloudflare and HTTPS. So given the âinvisibleâ changesâchanges we had done before in years gone byâwe know âitâs not us, itâs themâ.
Iâve listed the three Will models (or WiLL to use the original styling) as Toyotas after I confirmed this with another motorhead, the very knowledgeable Atsuhiro Takeda. They were also always listed as Toyotas by Auto Katalog many years ago, and I believe also by Toutes les voitures du monde. Atsu confirmed that that was how he believed they should be indexed. Iâve had those Will publicity images for a long time and itâs nice theyâve finally gone online in Autocade.
The only oddity in the Autocade stats is the rise in hits for our page on the Kia Morning (TA), coming from nowhere and into sixth place among model pages. Whomever the Morning fans are, I thank you!
Tags: 2022, Autocade, Bing, car, internet, JY&A Media, Kia, Mediawiki, Microsoft, publishing, Toyota Posted in cars, internet, publishing | No Comments »
01.08.2022
Here are August 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Tags: 1960s, 1970, 1970s, 1977, 1980s, 1987, 1989, 2022, actors, BL, British Leyland, car design, celebrity, Chrysler, design, film, Ford, Ghia, Honda, humour, James Bond, John Z. de Lorean, Land Rover, Lotus, modelling, Renault, retro, Roger Moore, Twitter Posted in cars, culture, design, gallery, humour, internet, UK | No Comments »
02.07.2022
Here are July 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Tags: 1960s, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970s, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1980s, 1986, 1987, 2007, 2010s, 2011, 2013, 2018, 2019, 2020s, 2022, actors, actresses, advertisement, advertising, Apple, Audi, Bertone, BL, book, Boris Johnson, British Leyland, car, celebrity, Chrysler, CitroĂ«n, design, Elle, Europe, Ferrari, film, Ford, France, Germany, GM, Hachette, humour, ITC, James Bond, Japan, Lamborghini, language, magazine, magazine design, Marcello Gandini, Mastodon, Mazda, McLaren, media, modelling, modernism, newspaper, Opel, Peugeot, Porsche, PSA, publishing, Renault, retro, Roger Moore, science fiction, social media, Spain, supermodel, technology, The Persuaders, Tony Curtis, Toyota, Triumph, TV, Twitter, UK, USA Posted in cars, culture, design, France, gallery, interests, marketing, media, politics, publishing, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
07.06.2022

On to more positive things. Earlier this year, Luxlife got in touch with us, to say Lucire had been shortlisted for their awards. It was later confirmed that we had become their ‘Most Pioneering Online Fashion Magazine 2022â, which I was very happy aboutâespecially as we started 25 years ago.
The judges did know of our UNEP partnership, and the fact we had diversified into print in 2004 (and kept that going in different countries). These points differentiate us from pretty much every fashion magazine. The fact family (namely my father) helped keep things going even during the toughest times, including the GFC, also distinguishes usâand a lot of this success is down to him.
You can read our release here, and I mention it on the Lucire website, too.
I was also stoked to see my interview with Komoneed go online. Komoneed is an online community providing global and local knowledge on sustainability, while avoiding false and unfounded information. You can even read it in German, and I had to clarify to a few people that no, I’m not fluentâthis was thanks to Komoneed’s translators. The Aston Martin is also not mineâthis was a press car from 2007, but I said to Komoneed they could pick whatever photos they wanted from our photo gallery. In fact, I’m still very proud of the story I wrote on the car 15 years ago.

Tags: 2022, Aston Martin, Australia, environment, fashion, Germany, interview, JY&A Media, Komoneed, Lucire, Luxlife, luxury, New Zealand, press coverage, publishing, sustainability, UK Posted in cars, internet, leadership, media, New Zealand, publishing, social responsibility, UK | No Comments »
03.06.2022
Here are June 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Notes
Most of these are self-explanatory, though the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper page with Panos Papadopoulos gets a mention. Panos name-drops me about his autobiography.
Tags: 1960s, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1970, 1970s, 1977, 1979, 1980s, 1982, 1985, 1987, 2015, 2022, actress, advertisement, airline, AMC, beauty, book, Brexit, car, celebrity, England, film, Ford, Germany, Göteborg, Göteborgs-Posten, humour, Instagram, James Bond, London, marketing, media, Medinge Group, modelling, modernism, newspaper, Nissan, Panos Papadopoulos, Philips, retro, Robert Brownjohn, Roger Moore, Sean Connery, sexism, Sweden, TV, Twitter, UK, USA Posted in branding, cars, culture, gallery, humour, interests, internet, marketing, politics, TV, UK, USA | No Comments »
16.05.2022
Itâd be unfair if I didnât note that I managed to see a âCreate postâ button today on Lucireâs Facebook page for the first time in weeks. I went crazy manually linking everything that was missed between April 25 and today.
Maybe I got it back as it would look even worse for Facebook, which still live-streams massacres as a matter of course in spite of its âpromisesâ after March 15, 2019, if white supremacist murderers had more functions available to them on the site than honest business people.
The upshot still remains: get your supporters going to your website as much as possible, and wind down whatever presence you have on Facebook. You shouldnât depend on it, because you never know when your page might disappear or when you lose access. Both are very real possibilities.
Bob Hoffmanâs newsletter was gold this week. It usually is, especially as he touches on similar topics to me, but at a far higher level.
This weekâs highlights: âBlogweasel calculations indicate that adtech-based targeting adds at least 100% to the cost of an online ad. In order for it to be more efficient it has to be more than twice as effective. I’m slightly skeptical.
âAn article in AppleInsider this week reported that, “Apple has revealed to advertisers that App Store search ads served in a non-targeted fashion are just as effective as those relying on targeting via first-party data.”â
Indeed, ads that might use the page content to inform their contents (contextual advertising) work even better. Why? The publisher might actually get paid for them.
Iâve seen so many ads not display at all, including on our own sites. Now, our firm doesnât use trackers, but we know the ad networks we use do. And for whatever daft reason, there are ad networks that wonât show content if you block trackers. (Stuff is even worse: their home and contentsâ pages donât even display if you block certain cookies.)
If we went back to how things were before tracking got this bad, the ads would be less creepy, and I bet more of them would displayâand that helps us publishers pay the bills. If you donât like them, there are still ad blockers, but out of my own interests, I would prefer you didnât.
I came across Drew Magarryâs 2021 article, âThereâs No Middle Class of Cars Anymoreâ, in Road & Trackâs online edition.
âYouâre either driving a really nice new car, a deeply unsatisfying new car, or a very old used car.â Drew notes that there are nasty base models, and also fully loaded ones, and the former âtreat you like absolute shit, and everyone on the road knows it.â
It seems whatâs happening is that the middleâthe âGLsâ of this world, as opposed to the Ls and GLSsâis getting squeezed out.
It says something about our society and its inequality.
Interestingly, itâs not as bad here with base models, and that might reflect our society. But look at the US, as Drew does, or the European top 10, where cheap cars like the Dacia Sandero do exceptionally well.
This goes back many years, and Iâve seen plenty of base models in US rental fleets that would make a New Zealand entry-level car seem sumptuous.
Finally, the legacy pages are reasserting themselves on Autocade. When the latest version was installed on the server and the stats were reset, the top 20 included all the models that appeared on the home page, as Mediawiki recommenced its count. Search-engine spiders were visiting the site and hitting those the most.
Fast forward two months and the top 20 are exclusively older pages, as visits from regular people coming via search engines outnumber spiders.
Until last week, the most visited page since the March reset was the Renault MĂ©gane II. It seems the Ford Taunus 80 has overtaken the MĂ©gane II. Peugeotâs 206+ (207 in some markets) follows, then the Ford Fiesta Mk VII and Renault MĂ©gane III.
Before the reset, the Ford Fiesta Mk VII was the top model page, followed by the Taunus 80, then the Mégane II, Opel Astra J, and Nissan Sunny (B14).
Probably no one cares, but as itâs my blog, hereâs the old, just before the switchover:

And hereâs where we are as of tonight:

You can see the ranking for yourself, as the stats are public, here.
Tags: 2022, advertising, Autocade, Bob Hoffman, Dacia, Facebook, inequality, JY&A Media, marketing, Mediawiki, privacy, society, technology Posted in business, cars, internet, marketing, publishing, technology | No Comments »
02.05.2022
Here are May 2022âs imagesâaides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Tags: 1950s, 1955, 1960s, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1970s, 1971, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980s, 1983, 1986, 2022, actress, advertisement, advertising, Alfa Romeo, Audemars Piguet, Autocar, Bertone, BL, Brazil, British Leyland, Canada, car, celebrity, Envoy, fashion, film, France, Germany, GM, Hollywood, humour, James Bond, language, magazine, marketing, modelling, musician, Netherlands, Opel, Panos Emporio, retro, Roger Moore, Saab, science, Sean Connery, Simca, Sweden, Switzerland, Triumph, Twitter, UK, USA, Vauxhall, watch Posted in cars, culture, gallery, humour, interests, internet, marketing, Sweden, technology, UK | No Comments »
24.04.2022

Not much of my old Drivetribe channel left now
Sadly, I was late to the demise of Drivetribeâthough as some on Reddit point out, the brand still exists on other channels. But as for hosting the content themselves, that ended in January, and we content creators had till then to get our stuff off.
I had been checking in there less and less over 2021, which is a real shame. It had been a favourite site of mineâcars, and like-minded fanaticsâbut I guess it takes a lot more than a community to make a community.
Maybe it was the people I followed, but I never really got the right mix of news and entertainment. Others might beg to differ. I had little desire to follow the foundersâClarkson, Hammond, May, and Wilman (sorry chaps, Iâve watched you all in one shape or another since the 1990s, and given Wilman’s nude appearances on Top Gear, they are not necessarily shapes I want in my head)âso it was down to other content creators and contributors.
Twitter gives me some joy because of various car accounts thereâAndrew at the Car Factoids and Andy with what must be a world-leading private brochure collectionâand contributing seems a breeze. Drivetribe was somewhat hampered with a less-than-easy-to-use interface and somewhere along the line, in its first year if I recall correctly, the typography changed for the worse (at least to my eyes).
And like so many social networks, it was about keeping the content there in the hope it would generate money for the core business. It did indeed have a separate programme for creators, where they expected to share in the loot, but ironically after I was approved to join, I lost interest in contributing. Maybe it was because I had my own sites that I could work on. Autocade eats up spare time with each model taking a good 15 minutes on average to illustrate, research and write.
Anything I wrote for Drivetribe exclusively, and there were a few pieces, is practically toast. There may be a few links on the Wayback Machine, but the rest is online history. Itâs hardly their fault: the closure was covered in automotive media extensively, although I never received any emails about it. Itâs a lesson once again to ensure that you keep copies of your own content; in my case, I might still have them in WordPerfect format on a DVD-ROM somewhere. Relevant ones appeared in Lucire and Lucire Men.
Speaking of hosting your own stuff, I wonder if this is what the future holds.
This comes at a time when another Tweeter I follow has lost his Instagram account for no reason he can fathom, and I shared with him that I wouldnât mind hosting my own photos on this very site. Instagram is a once-every-few-months network for me now, at least when it comes to posting on my personal account. (Iâll look at it more for Lucire.) If John is right, we could be looking at a separation again: those who can host their own will, and those who canât, rely on the mass services. There could be less interaction between groups of people, but then the social networks only have themselves to blame for fostering toxicity. We are only human: we found others to interact with and learn from in the early 2000s before Facebook and Twitter, and we can again. We might even find it more productive as we claw our time back from those services.
And if itâs about traffic, each post I make here gets multiples more views than most things Iâve posted to Instagram. Seven hundred is pretty normal. Is there any point, then? The negatives seem to outweigh the positives, and this becomes truer every day. Youâd be a mug to want to buy one of these services in 2022.
Tags: 2020s, 2022, car, Drivetribe, Instagram, social media, social networking, Twitter Posted in cars, internet, publishing, technology, UK | No Comments »
19.04.2022

On March 19, 2022, Autocade had accumulated 27,647,011 page views. That was the last recorded total, and the new site went live the following day. That means over 10,000 views didnât get added to that total, but as itâs the last I have (unless the Wayback Machine has one from the 20th ult.), then thatâs what Iâll have to use as the new zero point.
The new statsâ set-up on the more modern Mediawikis does not update the numbers live; instead, that happens once a day. Some time overnight it ticked over to 351,079 on the new server.
27,647,011 +351,079 = 27,998,090
Even being very conservative, Autocade will have served its 28 millionth page view by nowâthough I may update this page tomorrow after I confirm it.
Sorry, for those who hated these statistical posts, the new server hasnât seen the end of them! OCD is OCD!
March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
April 2021: 23,000,000 (three months for 23rd million)
June 2021: 24,000,000 (two months for 24th million)
August 2021: 25,000,000 (two months for 25th million)
October 2021: 26,000,000 (two months for 26th million)
January 2022: 27,000,000 (three months for 27th million)
April 2022: 28,000,000 (three months for 28th million)
Currently there are 4,551 models on there, with the latest Mercedes-Benz S-Klasse the newest entry.
PS.: And here we are, the following day. Autocade’s new stats’ page shows 361,627.
Tags: 2022, Autocade, JY&A Media, Mediawiki, publishing, server, technology Posted in cars, interests, internet, media, publishing, technology | No Comments »
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