After nearly four years, hundreds of thousands of followersAfter nearly four years, hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views, The Customized Ride has grown far beyond what founder Chris Benton imagined when he launched it in 2022. But behind the numbers is a much more complicated story—one involving the financial realities of independent automotive media, an unexpected father-and-son journey and the realization that there is still much more road ahead.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve watched several people who do something similar to what we do announce that they are shutting their brands down. One of those announcements came from a friend, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me think about The Customized Ride and everything that has happened since we launched on October 16, 2022.
The thought of walking away has crossed my mind before. It isn’t because I stopped loving cars or because I no longer enjoy what we do. If anything, the opposite is true. I still love arriving at a show without knowing what we’re going to find, meeting the people behind the builds and capturing a vehicle that makes you stop what you’re doing and grab the camera. What makes you think, however, is the financial reality behind doing all of that.
Social media can create a distorted picture of success. People see hundreds of thousands of followers, videos with millions of views and footage from automotive events around the country and naturally assume that a brand with those kinds of numbers must be highly profitable. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.
The Numbers Behind The Customized Ride
Since launching, The Customized Ride has generated approximately $20,000 in revenue. That’s certainly something to be proud of for a brand that grew from a hobby, but the number looks different when placed beside what we’ve invested simply to get out on the road and create the content.
In 2023, 2024 and 2025, we spent roughly $10,000 per year traveling to automotive events, or approximately $30,000 over those three years. That $10,000 annual figure represents the travel expenses associated with those trips, including hotels, gas, food and the other costs of getting to and from shows.
In other words, we’ve spent approximately $30,000 just traveling to create content, while The Customized Ride has generated approximately $20,000 in revenue since its launch. That also doesn’t account for other expenses involved in operating and building the brand outside of travel.
Then there is another investment that is much harder to put a dollar figure on: time. There are countless hours spent driving to shows, walking show fields, filming, editing, posting, answering messages and doing everything else that happens between capturing a vehicle and eventually putting that content in front of an audience.
None of that is a complaint. We made the decision to do it, and we’ve had experiences because of The Customized Ride that I wouldn’t trade. But I also believe there is value in occasionally talking about the part of building something that isn’t visible on an analytics screen. A large audience and a profitable business are not necessarily the same thing.
The Part I Never Planned
Perhaps the most meaningful thing to come from The Customized Ride wasn’t part of the original idea at all.
Cars have been one of my hobbies since I was 16. When I started The Customized Ride, it came from that passion. I wasn’t setting out to create a father-and-son automotive media team, and there was no grand plan for my son and me to build brands alongside each other.
Then Lil Chris started coming along, and it wasn’t long before I realized he was falling in love with the same hobby that had been part of my life since I was a teenager.
That changed everything.
What had been my interest suddenly became something we could experience together. We started traveling to shows, walking the grounds with our cameras, meeting owners and discovering the stories behind their vehicles. There were long drives to events and long drives home, hours spent filming and plenty of conversations along the way. Eventually, Lil Chris’s interest grew enough that he began building his own automotive media brand, Hot Classic Rides.
It all happened organically. I didn’t hand him a predetermined role in The Customized Ride and tell him this was what we were going to do together. He genuinely fell in love with the hobby, started developing his own eye for content and became part of this world alongside me.
Looking back, that accidental development may be one of the greatest things The Customized Ride has ever given me.
The Cars Are Only Part of the Story
The longer we’ve done this, the more I’ve realized that my favorite part of automotive culture isn’t necessarily the vehicle itself. Don’t get me wrong—I still love seeing an incredible build roll past the camera, hearing an engine fire up or discovering something at a show that I’ve never seen before. But increasingly, I’m interested in the person standing next to the vehicle.
Every car has specifications. Some cars have stories.
Sometimes it’s a vehicle someone has owned for 40 or 50 years. Sometimes it’s the car their father owned, a project they finished with their son or something that spent decades sitting before somebody decided it deserved another chance. Sometimes the most valuable part of a build has nothing to do with what it would bring at an auction.
Those are the things I’ve grown to appreciate more as we’ve traveled. We’ve had the opportunity to meet incredible owners and see vehicles that I never would have encountered otherwise. We’ve captured footage that has reached millions upon millions of people, and we’ve watched videos travel farther than we ever imagined when we pressed the record button at a car show.
Yet one of the greatest returns on everything we’ve invested in The Customized Ride will never show up in Facebook analytics. It gave my son and me something we genuinely love doing together.
Lil Chris is 14 now, and I’m increasingly aware that these years don’t last forever. There are only so many Saturdays when he’ll be this age and we’ll load up our equipment, climb into the vehicle and head toward another show. There are only so many long drives, afternoons walking show fields, inside jokes, conversations and memories that happen while your kid is still a kid.
Someday, I’m probably going to look back and realize those were some of the greatest returns The Customized Ride ever produced.
A Different Kind of Year
This year has forced me to think about all of this more seriously. With the cost of gas and travel being so high, we’ve only traveled to two shows in 2026, compared with around 10 in a more typical year.
I miss it.
I miss pulling into a show and not knowing what we’re going to discover that day. I miss hearing an engine fire up somewhere across the show field and immediately turning around to find out what it is. I miss meeting owners, hearing their stories and finding that one vehicle neither of us expected to see.
But there also comes a point where you have to look at the numbers realistically. We can’t simply continue spending thousands of dollars traveling and hope social-media monetization eventually catches up. If The Customized Ride is going to be here for the long haul, the business behind it has to become sustainable.
That doesn’t mean giving up on what we’ve built. It may simply mean learning how to build differently.
Building the Next Version
For years, much of our approach at shows was pretty simple: find great vehicles and film as many of them as possible. That approach worked. It helped us build an enormous library of original automotive footage and, more importantly, an audience that clearly loves cars.
But lately I’ve started asking a different question: What if we stopped measuring a successful show by how many cars we filmed and started measuring it by how many great pieces of content and stories we brought home?
That might mean spending more time with a handful of vehicles instead of trying to capture everything on the show field. It could mean getting the car rolling, then finding it parked and capturing the details. It could mean recording the engine, learning the story from the owner and discovering why that particular vehicle matters to them. Sometimes the story may be the build itself. Other times, the story may be the person standing beside it.
It also means looking differently at the enormous amount of footage we’ve already accumulated. We have years of original automotive content sitting in our archives. There are cars we’ve filmed from multiple angles, vehicles we’ve captured both parked and rolling, incredible engine sounds, unusual builds and moments we haven’t revisited in years.
That footage doesn’t have to be something we posted once and forgot about. We can combine footage of the same vehicles, build compilations, revisit memorable cars, add commentary, tell stories and find entirely new ways to use what we’ve already captured.
I’m also beginning to experiment more with putting myself into the content instead of always remaining behind the camera. One of my first attempts at adding commentary to our own automotive footage reached roughly 100,000 views through The Customized Ride and approximately 1.2 million views on my personal Facebook page.
One video doesn’t prove that every commentary video will perform that way, and I don’t expect it to. What it does tell me is that the idea deserves more than one attempt.
The same can be said about a lot of ideas I’ve had for this brand over the years. The truth is, there are many things I imagined doing with The Customized Ride that I simply never tried. At different points I posted less, allowed the brand to slide more than I should have and never really built out some of the ideas I had for what it could eventually become.
That matters when you start thinking about whether it’s time to walk away. Before deciding something doesn’t work, you have to ask whether you ever truly tried the version you believed it could become.
More Than Chasing Views
I don’t want the next chapter of The Customized Ride to simply be about chasing another viral video. We’ve had viral videos. We’ve had millions of views. Those things are exciting, and reach will always matter to a media brand, but there has to be something underneath the numbers.
I want us to tell more stories. I want to learn more about the owners behind the vehicles we film. I want to capture the sounds, details and atmosphere that make being at a car show different from simply scrolling past a picture of a car. I want to use our archives creatively instead of allowing years of great footage to sit untouched. I want to experiment with commentary, automotive reflections and other ideas that allow some of my own personality to become part of The Customized Ride.
Most of all, I want us to continue celebrating the reason all of this exists in the first place: a genuine love of automotive culture.
There will still be plenty of videos where a beautiful car rolls past the camera and we simply let the car speak for itself. Not every vehicle needs a documentary. Not every video needs commentary. Sometimes a great engine sound and a great-looking car are enough.
The difference is that now I see how many other possibilities exist around those moments.
There Is Still Road Ahead
Watching other independent creators decide that it was time to walk away has made me think seriously about what we’re doing. Passion matters tremendously, but passion alone doesn’t pay for the next trip. Eventually, a business has to become capable of supporting the work required to operate it.
That’s the challenge ahead of us.
Maybe we travel less but make each trip count for more. Maybe we cover more events closer to home while being selective about the major shows we travel to. Maybe we finally explore some of the ideas that have been sitting on the shelf while we were busy feeding the social-media machine. And yes, we have to become better at turning the audience we’ve spent years building into a business capable of supporting the content that audience enjoys.
I don’t know exactly what The Customized Ride will look like two years from now. That’s part of building something. You learn, adjust and occasionally realize that what got you to one stage isn’t necessarily what will get you to the next.
What I do know is that Lil Chris and I aren’t ready to give up.
Somewhere along the way, completely by accident, the hobby I fell in love with when I was 16 became something my son fell in love with too. What started as my passion became something we could share, and eventually something we could build alongside each other through The Customized Ride and Hot Classic Rides.
There are still cars we haven’t seen, owners we haven’t met and stories we haven’t told. There are ideas for this brand that have existed mostly in my head and have never been given a real opportunity to succeed. Before deciding what The Customized Ride can’t become, I think we owe it to ourselves to find out what happens when we actually build that version of it.
The road ahead may look different from the road behind us, and that’s okay. We’re going to keep learning, keep adjusting, keep telling stories and keep working toward making the business side sustainable without losing the thing that made us love doing this in the first place.
The Customized Ride and Hot Classic Rides are still here. And this father-and-son media team still has a lot of road ahead.
The Customized Ride covers car shows, car meets, car events etc..