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The e-mail looked like just another generic news release until two names caught my eye: Ari Henning and Zack Courts. With that, I started reading more carefully.
Most motorcyclists have crossed paths with the work these two have created. Over the past six years, their efforts have helped transform Motorcyclist Magazine from a print rag into a full-on multimedia motorcycle experience. Their YouTube videos, such as “On Two Wheels,” “MC Garage,” and “MC Commute,” have become staples in the motorcycle community.
Editor's note: Motor Trend has made the first episode of Throttle Out available for free. Watch it below.
They started creating videos with Source Interlink, the media company that owned Motorcyclist prior to the title being sold to Bonnier Corporation in 2013. During the nearly five years since the sale, Bonnier has championed their efforts and their following has grown. Motorcyclist’s YouTube channel recently surpassed 500,000 subscribers.
Therefore, when I read that Discovery Channel, in conjunction with the Motor Trend Group, would be offering the duo a new show, I wasn’t surprised. After all, beIN Sports, the same network that airs MotoAmerica and MotoGP racing in the United States, started broadcasting full-length episodes of “On Two Wheels” in 2017. What I didn’t realize until after speaking with Ari, is that unlike their agreement with beIN sports, they would be leaving Bonnier to team up with the crew at Motor Trend full-time.
In addition to the duo, Spenser Robert, the team’s producer, cameraman, and main collaborator of nearly five years, is going with them, as well. Together, the trio plans to make bigger and better moto content than ever before. But to fully understand where they're going with this move, we need to look back at where they’ve been.
The beginning
Ari and Zack grew up in New England, Ari on the end of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and Zack in the middle of Vermont. Their paths fortuitously crossed at a young age when the boys attended local races with their fathers, who were busy facing off on the starting grid. They became friends, spending their free time riding with one another. But when Ari's father had a career-ending accident in 1999, his trips to the track ended, as well. In an era prior to social media, the two teenagers lost touch.
“I decided at the last minute that I didn’t want to jump right into college,” Ari told me over Old Fashioneds in a dimly lit bar in Long Beach. “Instead, I took the money I had saved for school and I hit the road on a Suzuki Bandit 600. I ended up in California, and I loved it. When I returned to the Cape, I convinced my girlfriend at the time (now wife) to move west with me.”
Ari paid his bills with money he got from working odd jobs while submitting articles to Motorcyclist magazine. The publication’s then editor-in-chief, Mitch Boehm, had previously rubbed shoulders with Ari’s pops, Todd Henning, on the track. So when the young Henning showed up looking for full-time work, he wasn’t exactly a stranger.
Unbeknown to Ari at the time, Zack was following a more traditional route. After graduating from Suffolk University with a degree in print journalism, he moved west, as well.
“Zack was up in San Francisco working in healthcare. He was making a living as a copy editor and writing proposals and stuff,” Ari remembered. “Where he was traditionally trained, I was just learning as I went, writing about what I knew, motorcycles.”
By this point, the two hadn’t spoken in over 10 years. Appropriately, it was a racetrack that brought them back together.
“Zack had never stopped racing,” Ari told me. “I guess all of that time hanging out with his dad at the track had the same effect on him as it did with me. Anyway, I am set to race at this event and I am reading through the results sheet from a previous round and I see the name ‘Zack Courts’ and all I can think is that’s gotta be the same guy.” It was, in fact, the exact same guy.
It wasn’t long before Ari convinced his old friend to ditch corporate life in the Bay Area and move south. Zack joined the Motorcyclist’s masthead in 2012.
The Motorcyclist years
Around the same time Zack made the move to Motorcyclist, YouTube was looking for a way to improve the quality of content being uploaded to its platform. And good content costs money.
“The original 'On Two Wheels' came from the Motor Trend YouTube channel,” Zack explained during a recent Skype conversation, his face animated with excitement. “The original funding came via YouTube to create content about cars, and because there were associated magazines like Motorcyclist, bikes were included as well.”
“This is back when YouTube was paying people to create videos because it was still such a new platform,” Ari interjected, “They were trying to build up the programming, which is hard to believe now. Try to imagine a time when YouTube wasn’t dominant.”
If you remember it was around this time, with similar funding from YouTube, that Wes Siler and Jamie Robinson put RideApart on the map with fun videos about motorcycles. While those original RideApart videos were good, their longer form video content dried up not long after the initial funding was spent. But Zack and Ari fought to keep “On Two Wheels” alive.
“When Bonnier bought Motorcyclist Magazine from Source Media in 2013, they were forward thinking enough to acquire the rights to ‘On Two Wheels,’ as well. There was a lot of potential,” said Ari.
It wasn’t long before they were lining up sponsors and brands to help with funding. This was different from the traditional model of selling ad space in the magazine. YouTube in general was becoming more important for media platforms looking to expand their audience and Motorcyclist’s YouTube page was growing. With the momentum of “On Two Wheels” working in their favor, Spenser Robert was hired in early 2014 to help expand Bonnier’s video content.
Spenser is the youngin’ of the trio, graduating from Arizona State University in 2013 with a degree in film and media studies. During his final year of college, he worked as a video director for the WORCS Off-Road racing program before landing a gig as an associate video producer with Grind Media after graduation. What he lacked in age he made up for with a wealth of production knowledge that the other two lacked. (He even turned out to be pretty damn good on camera.)
Together, the three grew “On Two Wheels” and also developed new material. They introduced "MC Garage" to offer motorcyclists tips to help demystify some of motorcycling’s most confusing topics while playing to Ari’s superb mechanical knowledge. And then there is "MC Commute," which features Zack giving viewers a POV seat on some of the newest and most anticipated machines of the day. But after a little over five years of producing video content for Bonnier, the guys decided it was time to move on.
A future with Motor Trend
A move to Motor Trend is actually a move back home. What used to be Source Interlink is now The Motor Trend Group, the largest automotive media company in the world.
“We’ve known these guys for a long time,” Ari explained, “When Zack and I were originally helping to make the programming at Source Interlink, everyone was fresh out of college, there was this little video department that was a real seat-of-the-pants operation. You walk in there now and there are bays of editors and producers working on any number of projects. It’s so cool to go back and see these guys who were fresh out of college and a little confused seven or eight years ago and now they’re total professionals.”
It was the duo’s early relationship with Source Interlink that kept them top of mind with the folks at Motor Trend. So when it came time to green-light new motorcycle programming, they knew exactly who to call.
“The short version of this whole story is that Zack and Ari had this relationship with the Motor Trend team,” Spenser explained. “That allowed us a foot in the door. So while the folks over there started really growing the Motor Trend Platform, they were still constantly watching what we were doing with ‘On Two Wheels.’ So there has been this almost ongoing conversation of, you know, when the timing is right we want to make the biggest motorcycle show that we can. Within the last six months the timing became right for them and it worked for us, so here we are.”
But when you’re creating “the biggest motorcycle show” that you can, where do you distribute it? As it turns out, not on YouTube, but rather on Motor Trend’s app-based platform. (Despite what other outlets have reported, the trio tells me that at this time there are no plans to release to broadcast television.)
“When you release videos on YouTube, you become so beholden to SEO for people to find your content,” Spenser stated. “That’s the nice thing about this platform. We don’t have to put ‘new bike review’ in the title so people search for it. It’s more about telling the best stories you can with the most interesting people that you can.”
So what does that mean for you the viewers? It means a subscription fee of $4.99 per month. Or a little more than half the price of what the newest issue of Motorcyclist will cost you at the newsstand.
“We anticipate to see quite a bit of backlash from viewers,” Ari said with a sense of understanding in his voice. “I mean, if we take the content that we’ve been giving away for free and now we’re asking you to pay for it, we would expect that some people are going to get a little irritated. But the truth of it is we really don’t know what’s going to happen.”
It’s important to note that your $4.99 gets you access to all the shows on the Motor Trend app. So as their platform continues to grow, so does the bang for your dollar spent. It also frees the trio up to do things they never could before within the limitations of YouTube.
“If you liked ‘On Two Wheels,’ this is going to be a show you will enjoy because the background of the show is still going to focus on the relationship between Zack and Ari,” Spenser claims. “But the hope with Motor Trend’s support is that we more or less have unrestricted creativity. We’re excited to have the time and the resources that we can use to tell any story we want.”
When I pressed the guys to give me specifics on what we could expect to see, the responses were vague. Not necessarily because they didn’t want to tell me, but because they genuinely weren’t sure.
“At its core it’s going to be a motorcycle adventure and travel show about two lifelong best friends experiencing the world through the lens of motorcycling,” Spenser continues before Ari cuts him off.
“Our intention with this is to make it somewhat less technical and more experiential,” Ari says. “Think more narrative with adventure. We want to explore how motorcycles play different roles around the world.”
The idea here is that these aren’t just the same ol’ motorcycle reviews. While they still hope to showcase new bikes, they want to do so in their natural environment. But from what I can gather, it’s less about the specifics of the bikes, and more about the story of the people riding them.
“We feel really excited, but we also feel a huge responsibility to do it right,” Zack tells me. “We’ve seen so many people do moto content wrong, and spread less than appealing stereotypes where they almost paint motorcycling in this negative, cheesy light. We just want to do it justice and help to attract more people to riding.”
The whole operation is moving very fast and there are a lot of pieces that are still coming together. The title of the show is a perfect example of that. Up until two weeks ago, the working title for the show was “Uncaged.” But, as they recently learned, that name was already copyrighted. So now they’re scrambling to come up with a title.
The here and now
Ari and Zack want to leave Motorcyclist on the best terms, possible not just for themselves but also for their fans. They don’t want fans of the channel to show up and be blindsided. That sucks. Folks gravitate toward the personalities they identify with and trust, and they expect them to be there for them, waiting. The gang didn’t want to abandon that trust.
They plan to release three individual farewell episodes later this fall on Motorcyclist’s YouTube page. Although the departure of the hosts doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the series. According to what they have been told, Motorcyclist plans to sunset “On Two Wheels” but will continue production of “MC Garage” and “MC Commute” with new hosts.
As for Ari, Zack, and Spenser?
“We’re off to Mexico,” Ari told me over the phone. “Without giving too much away I can let you know that we are going to be filming the first episode in Baja, Mexico. Our loose goal is to try and trace the route of the original Baja 1000, which is hard because no one really knows the original route. We want to shoot something that doesn’t alienate Motor Trend’s existing audience while simultaneously introducing an entirely new audience to the publication.”
The two men have traveled a long road together, but their journey is far from over. It’s nice to know that wherever these two go, their goal is unwavering. They will continue to create killer videos designed to promote motorcycling to as wide an audience as possible.
As for me, I’ve downloaded the Motor Trend app and I’ve paid my $4.99. I want something good to watch on the internet, just like everyone else. Boys, I wish you luck.
