Britain's oldest car company thrives while Jaguar's rebrand burns: what YouTube analytics reveal about enthusiast audiences
A single creator's viewing data illuminates why manufacturers keep misreading their customers
Harry Metcalfe knows exactly where his audience sits. Nearly half are on sofas now, watching on televisions rather than scrolling on phones. The shift happened gradually, then all at once: 36% five years ago, 48.6% by December 2025. His videos haven't changed. Something else has.
This matters more than screen size suggests. YouTube, the platform that conquered attention spans with three-minute clips, has quietly become the dominant force in living rooms. Nielsen's April 2025 data showed it commanding 12.4% of total US television viewing—more than Netflix, more than any streaming service. One billion hours of YouTube content now flow through television sets daily worldwide. The amateur video site that broadcasters mocked has become their most dangerous competitor.
The living room migration
Television viewers behave differently from mobile scrollers. They settle in. They subscribe more readily—channel subscriptions through TV devices jumped 40% last year after YouTube simplified its interface. They pay: Premium now exceeds 125 million subscribers. And they watch longer, which is where the economics shift decisively. Creator revenue from TV-viewed content rose over 30% year-on-year. The number of creators earning most of their income from television viewing increased by the same proportion.
Harry's numbers capture this precisely. Views grew 7% in 2025. Hours watched grew 22%. That gap tells you everything. People aren't sampling his content; they're inhabiting it. A fifty-minute video about driving a Rolls-Royce to France—complete with a wayward wheel bearing, improvised repairs, and mechanical digressions that would doom a television pitch meeting—performed far better than he anticipated. He worried it would bore people. They watched it whole.
The platform's response has been to lean further into this transformation. YouTube now allows creators to organise channels by seasons and episodes, mimicking streaming services. 4K uploads rose 35% as producers recognised their content would appear on fifty-inch screens rather than five-inch ones. What emerges is something genuinely new: neither traditional television nor social media, but a hybrid offering creator authenticity with production values audiences now expect from their largest screens. A farmer with a camera and a barn full of interesting cars competes effectively with networks employing hundreds. This should terrify broadcasters more than they appear to recognise.
What enthusiasts actually watch
Harry's most-viewed video of 2025 wasn't about a rare Ferrari or a record-breaking drive. It was a conversation with Jeremy Clarkson about Jaguar's catastrophic rebranding—1.5 million views. Second place went to the new Morgan Supersport, an unexpected triumph from a company still building cars with ash wood frames. Third addressed industry turmoil as manufacturers struggled with contradictory signals about electrification.
The pattern reveals something the industry consistently misses. Enthusiast audiences aren't simply interested in expensive machinery; they're engaged with the industry's existential debates. Videos about EV policy generated both high views and fierce disagreement—they appeared among both the most-liked and most-disliked content. The audience isn't monolithic. It's genuinely divided, anxious about change, and apparently hungry to hear these questions discussed rather than resolved by corporate fiat.
What failed to attract attention proves equally instructive. The Dakar Rally—an event Harry loves enough to attend again this year—produced his least-watched video at 159,000 views. The McLaren Artura, technically accomplished but somehow emotionally inert, generated minimal interest. Classic car content underperformed modern machinery. Audiences can smell when passion is missing, and they can distinguish between heritage that lives and heritage that's merely invoked.
The authenticity paradox
In November 2024, Jaguar unveiled what it called the biggest rebrand in its 102-year history. The promotional video featured abstract visuals, colourfully dressed models, slogans like "Delete Ordinary" and "Copy Nothing." No cars appeared. The iconic leaping cat retired for a minimalist geometric badge. Response was immediate and brutal. Elon Musk asked publicly whether the company sold cars at all. Within six months, Jaguar had announced a review to replace the agency responsible.
The rebrand's failure gets attributed to cultural politics, but this explanation misses something deeper. Jaguar faced a genuine problem: the company has never been consistently profitable and sold only 13,528 vehicles last year against 58,000 Range Rovers from the same parent. Change was necessary. The catastrophe lay in believing that change required erasing identity entirely—that you could "Delete Ordinary" without deleting yourself.
Consider the contrast with Morgan Motor Company. The Malvern manufacturer celebrated its 114th anniversary by launching a flagship Harry called one of his favourite cars of 2025. Morgan builds roughly 200 vehicles annually, maintains waiting lists stretching twelve months, and still uses ash wood frames within bonded aluminium platforms. The company cannot compete on price, production speed, or technological innovation. It competes on authenticity. And it is thriving while Jaguar burns through its heritage in search of relevance.
Research on consumer behaviour illuminates why this disparity exists. Studies consistently show that traditionally made products are valued not simply for quality but for what they represent: cultural preservation in an age of standardisation. When consumers purchase artisanal goods, they aren't buying superior functionality—they're buying participation in craft traditions. Visiting Morgan's factory, watching craftspeople assemble your vehicle, receiving a car that human hands actually shaped: these experiences cannot be manufactured by marketing campaigns, however expensively produced.
Jaguar's slogan attempted to manufacture distinctiveness through messaging rather than making. It failed because audiences recognised the difference instantly. The same viewers celebrating Morgan's authenticity identified Jaguar's as hollow—a brand exercise masquerading as evolution. You cannot delete ordinary by declaring it deleted. You delete ordinary by making something extraordinary.
The sustainability question
Behind Harry's cheerful analytics lies a troubling admission. He receives roughly 100,000 comments annually across his two channels—270 daily. Responding to all of them would consume nine hours every day. He edits his own videos because outsourcing would kill the personal quality that makes them work. This means producing six videos monthly while managing a working farm and attempting, with increasing difficulty, to take holidays. He openly questions whether he can maintain the pace.
This is success. It is also, by any reasonable measure, unsustainable.
The broader creator economy confirms this individual experience at industrial scale. Research published in July 2025 found that 52% of creators have experienced burnout directly from their careers. Thirty-seven percent have considered quitting altogether. The primary causes reported were creative fatigue, demanding workloads, and constant screen time—but when asked to rank severity, financial instability emerged as the leading factor among those who'd burned out. And this despite revenues continuing to grow. The problem isn't failure. It's the demands of success itself.
Platforms encourage constant production through recommendation algorithms that punish inconsistency. Taking a month off risks algorithmic invisibility. Slowing output risks losing audiences built over years. The very authenticity viewers value—the sense of watching a real person with genuine expertise and honest opinions—requires precisely the unsupported labour that produces exhaustion. Harry does his own editing because he believes it matters. The audience agrees. The algorithm rewards it. His body and mind pay the cost.
His willingness to discuss this publicly represents something rare in creator culture: acknowledgment that the numbers everyone celebrates might not measure what actually matters. Hours watched are up 22%. So are hours worked. The relationship between those figures deserves more scrutiny than it receives.
What the V12s reveal
Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Aston Martin each launched new V12 supercars in 2025. This wasn't inventory clearance before regulations force electrification. The Ferrari 12Cilindri features a new naturally aspirated 6.5-litre engine capable of screaming to 9,500 rpm. The Lamborghini Revuelto combines its V12 with three electric motors for over 1,000 horsepower. The Aston Martin Vanquish deploys a twin-turbocharged V12 producing 823 horsepower. Billions in development spending created these machines. The manufacturers clearly believe there's a future worth that investment.
Harry's favourite was the Revuelto—not despite its hybrid complexity but because of what remained untouched. The normally aspirated V12 sits behind the driver, singing as it always has, while electric motors handle acceleration from standstill and urban crawling. Technology augments experience rather than replacing it. Character survives electrification when manufacturers prioritise preserving it.
This is what Jaguar missed and Morgan demonstrates: audiences don't oppose change. They oppose the elimination of distinctiveness. The Renault R5 electric appeared among Harry's most-viewed precisely because it possessed genuine personality—it looked interesting, had character, offered something beyond efficiency metrics and charging statistics. The manufacturers building new V12s understand something their marketing departments sometimes forget: the audience wants to feel something. Specification sheets don't create desire. Emotion does.
What the evidence actually shows
The convergence of Harry's analytics, YouTube's platform transformation, and automotive identity struggles points somewhere the conventional narratives miss.
Television audiences choose creator content over professional programming not because it costs less but because it offers authenticity that polished productions cannot replicate. A farmer talking about cars in his barn commands attention that escaped expensive television formats. Morgan demonstrates that genuine craft traditions coexist with modern technology—that heritage isn't a constraint but a competitive advantage. The new V12s demonstrate that electrification needn't eliminate character. And Jaguar's rebrand demonstrates, catastrophically, that abandoning heritage in pursuit of novelty satisfies no one.
The creator economy has built remarkable reach on labour models that appear unsustainable. Someone achieving 37 million views annually while questioning whether they can continue represents a systemic problem, not personal failure. The platforms profiting from this labour have responsibilities they've barely begun to acknowledge.
And audiences, it turns out, know what they want more clearly than the institutions claiming to serve them. They want authenticity, character, engagement with genuine expertise. They'll watch fifty-minute videos about wheel bearing problems if the person making them cares about the subject. They'll celebrate a 114-year-old company building vehicles by hand while mocking a century-old brand that abandoned its identity for abstract slogans.
The gap between what companies believe customers want and what those customers actually respond to has perhaps never been more measurable than in the viewing figures this single creator's year-end analytics reveal. Marketing cannot manufacture authenticity. Audiences can always tell the difference. The numbers Harry obsessively tracks have become, inadvertently, a verdict on an entire industry's confusion about what its customers actually value.