Jeremy Clarkson’s social network  loses key executive

The social network business set up by former Top Gear presenters Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond has lost a key executive as it gears up to expand its coverage to sports and music.

DriveTribe, a social network for car fans that allows them to connect with the trio of presenters, lost chief financial officer Dylan Murphy earlier this month.

Mr Murphy, who was also the company’s head of operations, legal and HR, left the business following a three-month handover process, DriveTribe chief executive Jonathan Morris confirmed.

The executive will be replaced by two internal promotions, Mr Morris said.

Mr Murphy was previously the chief financial officer of SwiftKey, a keyboard app that sold to Microsoft for $250m (£192m) in 2016.

The departure of Mr Murphy comes after DriveTribe experienced a 25pc surge in traffic during lockdown. Monthly active users rose from 9 million to around 11.4 million.

DriveTribe’s chief executive believes the rise in users accessing the site came largely from males aged between 30 and 50. “We saw a very, very rapid rise at the start. It’s been nicely ticking up ever since,” Mr Morris said.

The business is now considering expanding to launch new social networks about sports and music beyond its existing sites about cars and food.

DriveTribe had considered launching a travel site this year, but no longer plans to do so following the collapse of the travel industry during the coronavirus pandemic.

Lockdown severely affected revenues during March, Mr Morris said, but marketing spending has since returned to healthy levels.

“There was almost an entire freeze on new marketing expenditure in the automotive industry,” he said. “Things were looking pretty ropey through March for DriveTribe targets.”

The business no longer expects to reach profitability at the end of 2020 as previously planned. It instead expects to reach that point by the end of 2020.

Mr Morris said DriveTribe does not currently need to raise fresh funding, commenting that the company has a “good fighting fund” to run on.

Last year, the business borrowed £5m from Elisabeth Murdoch, the daughter of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch.