A short history
What happened to CarDomain?
It was sold, twice, and then the car profiles stopped being reachable. If you built a page there, this is what became of it — and how to get your photographs back.
The short version
CarDomain Network was founded in Seattle in 1998 by Alex Algard and Simon Han. It began as SoundDomain.com, a forum for people showing off car stereo installations, and the vehicle profiles that made it famous came later. By the end of 2004 it had 1.5 million registered users, 70 employees and $13.3 million in revenue.
In November 2008 it cut sixteen jobs — about half its staff — with the chief executive citing the economy and “very pessimistic industry projections of advertising budgets.” It acquired StreetFire, an automotive video community, in April 2009. In 2012 it was sold to Source Interlink Media, which was later renamed TEN: The Enthusiast Network and then Motor Trend Group.
Enthusiast forums have been asking where the profiles went ever since. Today the site returns nothing.
Sources: Wikipedia, GeekWire (2012), Xconomy (2008).
If you had a page there
Try the Wayback Machine before anything else. The Internet Archive crawled CarDomain for years, and a great many profiles survive there even though the live site doesn’t.
- Go to web.archive.org and paste in your old profile address — something like
cardomain.com/ride/1234567. If you don’t remember it, search your email for “cardomain”; the notification emails usually contain the link. - Pick a date from when the page was live. The calendar shows every capture the archive holds.
- Save the photographs first. Right-click and download each one. Images are hosted separately and tend to disappear from archives before the pages do, so they’re the part most at risk.
This works for a lot of dead sites, not just this one. It’s worth trying for any car forum or gallery you used to post to.
Why it went, and what it says
CarDomain didn’t fail because people stopped caring about their cars. It was squeezed by an advertising collapse in 2008, and then by Facebook and Instagram, which gave everyone a simpler place to post — and it ended up owned by a media company that had other priorities.
None of that was the users’ doing, and none of them got a vote. Fifteen years of photographs, build threads and write-ups became inaccessible because a business changed hands. That is the ordinary way these things end.
Where to put it now
Garage Chronicle is a place to keep a car’s story and its history — the sort of thing a CarDomain profile held, with more attention to the record and less to the profile.
It would be dishonest to promise this site will outlive us; nobody can promise that, and CarDomain is the reason. What we can do is make sure you’re never locked in: download everything you’ve written whenever you like, as one file that opens in any browser. Photographs, story, timeline, dates. If this site ever went the same way, you would still have your car’s record on your own machine.
Have a look at the registry first — the cars there will tell you more than any description of the site would. If you decide you want a page, it’s free and takes a few minutes.
No affiliation with CarDomain, Motor Trend Group or the Internet Archive. If something here is wrong, or you know more about what happened to the profiles, tell us and we’ll correct it.