Happy New Year 2026
Happy New Year 2026 from Daily Turismo to everyone out there in cyberspace. I wasn’t planning on writing some long-winded 2025 year-in-review post, but now that I’ve opened this can of beans, I feel like I have to say something. What does everyone write? Oh yeah, 2025 was a good year for Daily Turismo, not a great or transformative year, but a year of consistency and organic growth. The year started off slowly, but DT reached 170K unique monthly visitors in November…certainly not the highest visitor count in the site’s history, but not bad for the past few years.
One interesting modern era struggle was this past summer, when I started getting notifications that DT had exceeded bandwidth limitations from our web host based on the amount of data requested from users. Was this because DT was blowing up the internet? Regardless, this meant that I now had to either deal with a significantly slowed-down site or pay for the next tier of bandwidth and site size. Naturally, I pulled out my tools and started digging into the root, because my unique visitor stats had not increased…but the number of AI bots scraping every single byte of data from every single page, comment, story, image was the root cause. Arrggg…AI bots. A few simple edits to DT’s user-agent blocking scripts, and a strategic blockade of several foreign countries solved the AI scourge of 2025. The digital robot Huns might be at the gates, but they haven’t gotten inside yet.
Speaking on the AI front, I experimented with using AI to generate some DT content, but the results were far from optimal. In the same way that telephones were engineered during the early days of PacBell et al to produce thin nasal sounding voices by clipping to a narrow 300HZ-3KHZ bandwidth (this is a legacy sound that continues to a modern iPhone today, even when more digital throughput is available)– Artificial Intelligence seems to have generated its own voice. Nobody writes like ChatGPT, except ChatGPT…which I guess is a good thing — particularly if you are the guy who wholesales double-m dash type setting equipment. However, I have used AI to do some proofreading and continue to use it for clarification of grammar rules and other robot-appropriate tasks. Just don’t ask it to do anything creative or fun…robots don’t do fun.
What’s next for DT? That’s a good question. What do you want for the site? Put some ideas (I want more of …and less of ….) in the comments or send me an email: tips@dailyturismo.com. Stay safe, and Happy New Year 2026.
-Vince
DT Editor-in-Chief & Chief-of-Chiefiness
Longtime lurker, first time commenter…just please keep doing what you do. DT is my daily moment of zen.
Thanks for joining the commentariat!
Happy 2026 Vince and fellow readers. Great job standing up against the AI invasion. You don’t want to become another Jalopnik. The most AI automotive site on the internet. Not worth a visit anymore.
I thought Jalopnik went belly-up when Gawker got Hulked? Jalopnik is still around…hang on…oh boy. JAIlopnik! How far the mighty have fallen. At least Graverobber is still writing his “Nice Price or Crack Pipe” features…despite the newer lame “Nice Price of No Dice” label.
Happy New Year!!! Thanks for keeping my inner Joe Dirt going with the modern versions of the autotrader mags.
Mohr Joe Dirt inbound! Prepare your mullet.
Thank you for this website. It’s at the top of my bookmarks list and gets a daily look.
On New Years Eve I directed a couple of young whippersnappers who are into autos, (one is an AudiHead and the other wants a C5 Corvette) to your site. Before my very eyes they accessed DT on their individual phones and were immediately entrenched in awe and exclaiming out loud “look at this” and “whoa”. It reminded me of a time, before the internet, where my friends and I would hit the 7-11 and get someone to buy us a 12er of Lucky Lager while we would buy the latest edition of Auto Trader’s Classic Car Trader. We’d drink the beer, solve the puzzles, and look (in awe) at all those no rust beautiful cars for sale in FL and say things like “look at those headlights” and “push button transmission” and “those wings THOSE WINGS!”.
So please keep going, for the kids.
Remember the abbreviations folks would put into those 25 word autotrader adverts? PS/PB/PL/AT/PDQ. What a time to be alive!!
I’m also considering a C5 for 2026. One of the best performance bargains on the market!