Electrifying
Specialist online newsbrand covering the electric car market Electrifying is said to be turning a healthy profit for its founders some six years after launch.
The site reaches around 400,000 unique monthly users, said founder and CEO Ginny Buckley, who did not divulge exact financial figures for the privately-owned business but said the EBITDA figure was healthy and revenue has more than doubled year on year.
“We were created to help car buyers navigate the biggest shift in how we drive since the horse and cart gave way to the car, so we wanted to help them navigate that transition with trusted, independent journalism, with really expert advice, and importantly for me, with engaging video content,” said Buckley.
The newsbrand also has a weekly newsletter sent on Mailchimp with 40,000 free subscribers, a weekly podcast with around 25,000 listeners per episode across platforms, and a Youtube channel with 250,000 subscribers and around five million monthly views. Buckley said it is “the most watched EV review channel globally” on the platform.
The site had net assets of around £296,000 in ten months to 31 December 2025, up 457% since the year ending 28 February 2025 (£53,000) according to the publisher’s Companies House filings .
It was named specialist/B2B website of the year in 2026 at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards for “great content presented in an engaging and accessible style” and “impressive” revenue and audience figures.
Judge and senior lecturer in digital journalism at City St George’s James Morris (left), Mike Askew, deputy editor at Electrifying, Nicola Hume, associate editor, Sara Price, director of people and partnerships and host Robin Morgan (right) as Electrifying collects award for specialist/B2B website of the year at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards on Thursday 10 September 2026. Picture: ASV Photography for Press Gazette
The site was set up with the aim of “changing the conversation around cars”, said Buckley.
“I just wanted to bring that more current affairs, almost conversational approach to it. So, it was very deliberately launched with a very different tone of voice to all the legacy media outlets that were out there covering automotive.”
Buckley was motoring editor of Good Housekeeping for seven years before leaving to launch Electrifying with a mostly female editorial team.
“Women make up half of licence holders in the UK and I think it was important to bring that different perspective to what is traditionally a male-led, very enthusiast-focused coverage,” she said.
Electrifying now has 12 staff, nine of them full-time, including four journalists.
Buckley said male readers also appreciate the title’s different take on motoring journalism.
“We think a lot about how wide the doors open for getting kids in and out of the back, just those practical things, and they just say, ‘you just talk about things in a different way, and it brings a different perspective’,” she said.
This has helped the publisher attain a “really strong foothold in EVs”, said Buckley, adding that other automotive journalism doesn’t “answer those questions” specifically relevant to electric vehicles.
Video ‘helps prioritise’ Electrifying in search
Electrifying’s team is largely made up of people with TV backgrounds, which has shaped Electrifying’s approach to video, said Buckley.
Video has always been used by the team to help Electrifying “supersize our return on SEO results really quickly, because of Google and Youtube”, she added.
“When you’ve got written content on a website, but you’ve also got video content, it aggregates those together and helps to prioritise you.”
Over the last year Electrifying has “really brought video more within the heart of the website”, including through a vertical swipable video player designed to work like a Tiktok -style feed.
The videos range from self-shot content to professionally produced pieces and include car reviews, news explainers and new car launches. The site currently publishes one to two videos a day with plans to increase this.
“[Journalists] will write a story, but they’ll also record a video. It’s just about giving people the information in different ways.
“As traffic dips to websites, and as video becomes really important with the LLMs, I do feel the fact that we started doing this five, six years ago has really put us in good stead for that.”
Optimising content for AI search
Electrifying is “100%” appealing to AI search after finding their video focus, plus being an expert voice in a niche field, helps them surface in AI Overviews and chatbot summaries, said Buckley. The publisher is also transcribing its videos and integrating those transcripts into its website, so search engines and AI systems have more text-based information to interpret.
“We’re actually finding that we return very highly in AI search for a lot of brands now, so one big global automotive manufacturer shared with us recently that after their own.com brand, we were the second most returned site out there for the LLMs [referencing their brand],” said Buckley.
According to Similarweb, 37% of Electrifying’s traffic is direct while 56% comes from organic search.
“We don’t use jargon, and I think it’s making sure that the tone of voice that we have in the video exists on the website as well for the bots to scroll through and look… We’re really happy with AI at the moment and how it’s working for us because it’s bringing us traffic.”
Electrifying also focuses on advice articles and pieces answering questions about car models to surface in LLMs.
Read more: [LLM citation mastery: Tips from Axios publisher Nicholas Johnston]
Quality content drove partnerships
While video and LLM surfacing have helped Electrifying build its audience, commercial partnerships have been the turning point for revenue growth.
The title makes money from a mix of lead-generation services, Youtube ad revenue share, sponsored content production, site and newsletter takeovers and display advertising.
Buckley said all areas are growing year on year, but “we really saw the dial change for us about two years ago” when Electrifying brought more commercial partnerships on board.
“People saw the quality of the content that we produce and we make, and brands wanted to appear alongside that,” she said. “Brands know that we talk to a highly engaged EV audience. People coming to us, they’re looking to buy a car… it’s a very targeted audience.”
Electrifying was able to secure bigger, longer-term commercial partnerships after car brand Skoda “took a real punt on us two years ago and gave us quite a big campaign”.
“We’re really grateful to the brands that have taken a chance with us, where we’ve found it harder is the agencies… that’s now starting to change as well,” she said. “You’ve just got to get your growth right and you’ve got to have an engaged audience as well.”
Electrifying builds an engaged audience by monitoring feedback through Youtube comments and podcast communications (“about half of the podcast is given over to the comments that people write in with”). It also conducts annual research pieces with motoring association AA to understand the needs of potential EV drivers.
“It’s not just about giving them the information,” Buckley said. “You have to listen to what they want. We do loads of research with our audience and with the wider driving population in the UK to find out what are their concerns, what are their worries, what do they want to know about?”
Electrifying has also built its brand around its editorial team and their personalities, with reviews containing personal comments from journalists and its Youtube videos centred around five key presenters.
“We’re all very different, so I think it’s been really important to not build a brand around one person,” Buckley said. “We get lots of messages in saying, ‘we feel that you’re like a group of friends that we can ask a question of, and everybody’s opinion has equal weight’.”
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