All About Allpar
What is Allpar?
Allpar is a Web site owned by Allpar, LLC and set up for the benefit of Dodge, Chrysler, Plymouth, DeSoto, Eagle, and Jeep owners and enthusiasts (along with those of related brands and companies). Allpar content has been contributed by a large variety of individuals (bios of some major Allpar contributors).
Allpar has information on a huge variety of vehicles, and is not prejudiced towards any particular type of car. There's a section for offshore-only Mopars, one for squad cars and other fleets, another for racing, etc. Allpar is unspecialized, going back to the pre-Chrysler days and forward to 2014 and beyond. We get between 900,000 and 1,100,000 visitors per month.
Tenth Anniversary
We’ve come a long way in ten years fourteen years - longer in the time since 1993 when Allpar’s predecessor was first created. We created the rec.autos.makers.chrysler newsgroup and the Valiant and EEK mailing lists, and revelled in corrections and details from people like Bohdan Bodnar and Dan Stern. Then there was the Daimler roller coaster flume ride, by coincidence starting in the same year we got the Allpar.com domain name and split off valiant.org.
Allpar would not be anything close to what it is today, were it not for a dedicated group of people who wrote with encouragement, tech tips, and photos, who corrected mistakes and added detail, and who spread the word.
Allpar in print
- Hemmings Motor News did a profile on Allpar in January 2010.
- Ray Wert featured a segment on Allpar in his New York Times story on automotive web sites.
- Business Week and the Rockford Register Star interviewed webmaster David Zatz in 2007 on the Chrysler sale. The Star came back for another quote in 2011 on the Hornet.
- Automobile credited Allpar in their December 2007 feature on the L’il Red Express Truck.
- CNN Money has interviewed the Allpar webmaster for several stories. The official Chrysler blog and CNN Money both featured the 200,000 Mile Club.
- Allpar was quoted as a source in several Toledo Blade articles, such as this one, in Automotive News articles, and in Detroit Free Press (such as this one).
- Mopar Now! featured the world's quickest SOHC Neon — which boasted a big allpar.com logo, thanks to Howell Automotive.
- A chain of Canadian newspapers including the Windsor Star used photos and information from allpar.com, eventually, and grudgingly, providing credit...at least, when we caught them.
- Allpar’s editor was interviewed on the ending of the PT Cruiser, with the resulting quotes appearing in USA Today, the Detroit News, the New York Times, and the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph.
- At various times in the mid-2000s, Chrysler's owner magazines quoted from or mentioned allpar.com.
- That's in addition to the auto blogs (e.g. Jalopnik, Autoblog, and TorqueNews) quoting back and forth...
Staff
- Publisher: David Zatz, Ph.D.
- Head of Development: Katherine H. Zatz, Ed.D.
- Head of Marketing: Robert O’Neill
- News Editor: William Cawthon
- Forum Master: Jim Choate
- Assistant Editor: Jennifer Harrington
- See our contributor bios • See our fledgling style sheet
Advertising
Most of our advertising comes via Google AdSense; we don’t need to spend time on tracking and invoicing that way. Advertising is used to fund time off from what would normally be our regular job, as well as server rental, meet support, and other fees.
A Personal History of Allpar
(Adapted from Mopars in Motion; by David Zatz)
Allpar was started in 1994 at www.mordor.com/valiant, later moving to cyberwar.com/~valiant/, first seeing life as "Valiant's car pages" and focusing on the Valiant. The Sundance was soon added, since I owned one; then other models joined in, and other people started to write. Around that time, I also started the rec.autos.makers.chrysler newsgroup and FAQ, which are both still around.
There are still traces of the original site on the Internet, including an article on “What’s New With NSCA Mosaic: September 1995,” a January 1995 e-mail message I sent, and a few links I'll apparently never be able to get updated.
From mordor.com (peak: 5,000 visitors/month), the site moved to another local ISP (cyberwar.com/~valiant/), then to z.simplenet.com. After spinning off the Valiant pages (valiant.org), as an experiment in using our own domain name and a new service provider (Esosoft), I started a search for good web site names, because I never wanted to write to hundreds of people to update a link again. It had to start with an “A” because this was the age of the alphabetical Internet directory — which is how Yahoo started out. We cleared “allpar” verbally with a member of Chrysler’s legal department around a year later.
Allpar caught the last bits of the Internet bubble, bringing in enough advertising for me to take two days a week off from work and still pay the bills. Then the advertising market fell to pieces, popup ads were everywhere, and DoubleClick started running ads that installed spyware on users’ computers, which meant we had to drop them or watch them like hawks. It looked like the end for a three-days-on-Allpar-and-two-on-my-career schedule.
Suddenly, Google rode in to the rescue.
To show how wondrous Google AdSense was, consider Overture (née goto.com): they started the business of auctioning placement on various web sites. After a while they set pricing for keywords at a floor of five cents per click; many customers paid over a dollar per click. Webmasters were paid one penny per click, regardless. Then Overture decided that any revenue share was too much, and ended the revenue sharing program entirely.
Google, being less greedy, started up with a revenue share of (we think) 60/40 — with webmasters getting the lion’s share. That allowed us to drop those horrible popup ads that everyone hated, and let me take off whole weeks from “work.” My career as an organizational change and research consultant has wound down somewhat, but I can work a lot more on Allpar, pay for a dedicated server (somewhat more necessary as our readership hits a million viewers per month), and help others to take time off work and join in.
I actively invite people to participate and add material, and in fact there's no way I could have written the thousands of pages currently up on the site. I just don't have that range of knowledge. So I'm happy to edit and learn, and support those more and less knowledgeable than myself.
Disclaimers
Allpar is not owned or affiliated with Chrysler or its Mopar Parts division. Allpar stands for "A Layman's List of Practical Auto Resources."
Allpar does not endorse any product or service. Most information has been sent in by our viewers; other information is from books, magazines, newspapers, and Chrysler press releases. Most material has not been completely verified. Any technical tips, performance hints, etc. are undertaken at the user's risk. Most have not been attempted by the Webmaster, who, after all, has only one car and not much time. Allpar is neither formally nor informally supported by or affiliated with Chrysler Corporation. Allpar is owned by Allpar, LLC, a limited liability company in the State of New Jersey.
Information
- You can write to us by clicking here.
- Get free updates to our site! Click here.
- We also keep track of Chrysler news.
- Here are some of the people who keep Allpar alive
Here are some of the awards we’ve won (these are the better ones - the “awards” phase of the Internet lasted from 1995 to about 1999.) Some of these used to be big deals - like Point, LookSmart, and Argus. Only one remains in existence and is still a big deal - the Open Directory. As far as we know, the others are all dead, though I could be wrong. (Note: most of the award logos were dropped from this page due to their total irrelevance.)
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We use a Mac to do just about all work on the site, and always have - starting with a Mac Plus (4 MB of RAM and 40 MB of hard drive space with an 8 MHz processor, which booted up in around five seconds). Computers used to build this site started with that Mac Plus, then a Quadra 605 (LC 475), beige G3, dual G4, and finally the current first-generation Mac Pro.