What Garage Dreams was

As mentioned in the overview, Garage Dreams was an automotive site that I ran from around 2016 to 2024. It originally started as more of a social media-focused site with shorter content. However, I felt there was a lack of really detailed information, especially around things like buyer’s guides for cars.

At its peak, there were around three people, including me, helping to create content for the site. Everything was researched and written by us, with me acting as the primary content producer, editor and developer.

The buyer’s guides became a key part of the site. I had noticed that a significant number of the existing guides on the internet were quite limited. You had publications like Autocar publishing buyer’s guides, but they were often very short. On the other hand, forums and enthusiast groups usually covered a much wider range of problems and interesting details about a particular car, but that information was scattered across different posts and could be difficult to find and read.

I started with the Toyota Supra Mk4. I didn’t have the money to buy one at the time—although I wish I had—but it was one of my favourite cars, and I was constantly reading about it. After going through a few buyer’s guides, I realised that they were all fairly limited. I wanted something with much more detail, so I went through forums, websites and videos and collated as much information as I could find about the car.

I soon realised that this was a common problem with buyer’s guides, so I decided to pivot the site in that direction.

The resulting guides ran to 20,000, 30,000 and sometimes even 40,000 words. While I didn’t know it at the time, the amount of information in those guides would become incredibly useful for this project. I don’t think the automated site would have worked if the original guides had been much shorter.

It became more than a side project

At its peak, Garage Dreams was getting around 2,000 to 3,000 users a day and was monetised through Mediavine and a few other methods. For something as narrowly focused as long-form car buyer’s guides, I was pretty happy with that. The site eventually became a sizeable share of my earnings.

I also started a YouTube channel built around 3D-animated videos. I deleted some of the older videos because they no longer matched the standard I wanted, but the channel still attracted a significant audience.

Why it stopped

Google search changes, followed by the arrival of AI-generated search results, steadily whittled the traffic down. By the time I stopped working on the site, it was getting around 300 to 400 users a day. It had remained at that level for long enough that continuing no longer made sense.

It was sad, but it wasn’t entirely a loss. The 3D animation and simulation work had brought back my interest in engineering. Python scripts for Blender, along with a growing amount of web development work, gradually pulled my day-to-day work in a new direction.

The site stopped, but all the research behind it was still sitting there. This rebuild is an attempt to make use of that work without pretending it came from nowhere. The old guides provide a large collection of previously researched source material that the new articles can be based on and traced back to.

I also learned one very important business lesson: don’t rely on one or two companies for almost all of your traffic.