Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on August 2, 2026.
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Welcome to the 137th entry into our monthly income and traffic report!
In this monthly update we share our traffic, earning, and spending figures for our blogs from the previous month so you can get a glimpse inside the business of blogging. In addition to sharing these for your use, by publishing our information we are also able to stay on track with our own goals for our business.
Prior to reading, it is worth noting that we feature two travel blogs in this report (one global and one local) and our income is based on the combined total of the two. We break down the traffic for each in this report for additional information.
July 2026 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of July was roughly 32,500 page views. This was an increase of 11% on a per day basis from July and an increase of 400% from June 2025.
Coming off the heels of June, where we broke our goal of hitting 25,000 pageviews to join Raptive, we saw a nice jump in traffic continuing throughout July.
Admittedly, there was one specific caveat for this, and it was because Norway was doing really well in the World Cup for a while. No, really!
Apparently some of our Norwegian articles rank really well right now, and we had a few top articles rank #1 in search results during their epic run during the tournament. So we saw a nice spike in traffic that, sadly, dropped down after they were eliminated.
Without this I would argue that our traffic would otherwise be down from June ever-so-slightly, but we’ll take the extra 6,000 or so pageviews and give Erling Haaland and the rest of the team our thanks for helping us earn a bit of money this month. We were rooting for you to go all the way!
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in July was approximately 138,800 page views. This was an increase of 8% on a per day basis from June and an increase of 21% from July 2025.
Now that we are firmly in the peak of summer, we tend to see a steady traffic rise on Discover the Burgh from now through December. Historically we’ve always seen a nice jump in July from June, often around 20%, and this year was no different as there are just so many awesome events going on around the city.
The last few years we’ve only ever hit these figures in December, normally about 25% higher than where we were in July, so we’re really excited where the rest of the year takes us.
Things seem like they’re somewhat on the right track, for a moment at least!
July 2026 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for July was approximately $7,290, down approximately 5% per day basis from June and a decrease of 30% from July 2025. This income was approximately 80% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $3,750
*Sponsored Ads: $70
*Affiliates: $2,700
*Book Sales: $320
*Social Bonus: $450
Although we were down in income year-over-year, primarily due to not taking on any sponsored contracts this month, we were up in most all of our passive categories like display advertising, affiliates, and social bonus revenue.
The display advertising jump is notable as we installed Raptive on our site towards the beginning of the month and already saw a nice RPM improvement. While we’re still nowhere close to the premium rates our local blog commands, its nice to see extra revenue coming in for the same ad layouts that we had on our former host.
We’re hoping this also constitutes a floor of earnings for the rest of the year as well, since our traffic tends to hold or rise throughout the rest of Q3 and Q4. If that happens, we will most assuredly beat last year’s income total and perhaps be pushing towards record year territory.
I’ll be honest- I’m not holding my breath for that, though.
Note: We run more websites in addition to these two travel blogs. This income and expense report only includes income from these two sites. These additional sites were started well after we started this income tracking series, and we have decided not to add those income streams in to keep this one focused on our travel blogs only.
July 2026 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of July were roughly $1,191 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $450
*Advertising: $150
*Instagram Certification: $16
*Website Design: $500
*Domains: $75
This month’s spending was a little bit higher than average as we paid a designer to build out a new site within our local blog’s brand. However, we’ve hit some snags on that end to see if we can get it live, so hopefully we have good news coming next month to not have that be a total loss.
*We do not share our travel/local expenses in this report. This can be anywhere from $100-$3,000+ per month extra, but your mileage may vary as the costs to generate content can vary wildly from blog to blog. We strive to only share true blog operating expenses here.
August 2026 Goals
It seems like everything takes a lot longer than we’re used to, and building out our new site to support our local blog has, naturally, stalled.
Although we’ve made a lot of progress in writing articles, most all of our backend goals have had lackluster progress through forces outside of our control. As such, building out more backend sites and upgrading features that are not as obvious from a reader’s perspective will be our goal for August as well.
Looking For Past Reports?
Unlike other websites that host an article series on this topic, we only have one article for our travel blog income and traffic reports.
We do this for a number of reasons, but it is mostly because we do not want dozens upon dozens of posts on our site on this one specific topic. Over time, the monthly details become irrelevant and trends are the only thing that matters.
To compensate for this, we update this article every month based on our current data and publish a graphical summary of previous months as well. If you have any questions about data from a specific month we are happy to share more details via email if you contact us.
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Hi! How long have you been planning a switch to Raptive? I’m also contemplating switching to Raptive from Mediavine. I have no qualms with Mediavine but have found their RPMs to consistently decline over the years. I’ve received countless emails from Raptive promising higher RPMs but a bit hesitant to change up my whole setup!
So I have had two blogs on Raptive since October 2025 and just got this one (Living the Dream) accepted last month and will be changing over from Journey to Raptive here in about two weeks.
I have some of my full thoughts at https://thisweekinblogging.com/mediavine-vs-raptive/ with my RPM breakdown for my local blog. In Q4 and Q1, my local Pittsburgh blog had excellent YoY increases with Raptive (+50-70%), but so far from April to now I’ve been down about 5-9% YoY. It’s hard for me to compare exactly considering the market at large, so I’m not sure if, for example, Mediavine RPMs have changed much on their own- so your mileage may vary there. I am trying to have my ad setup be virtually identical, for what it is worth.
I am enjoying Raptive and I do think I’m likely making more money overall than when I was on Mediavine, but I was also getting frustrated with other things beyond just the RPMs dropping that made me switch.
On the bright side, you had an increase of 25 percent income from last year. I read your updates with the stats and different information. I have been keeping up with your reports over the last year.
Very true. It’s sometimes hard to see the positives through everything, but you’re absolutely right. Thank you so much for following along too!
Do you think sponsorships or content creation packages for local businesses could be a primary source of income? Either companies paying you to promote their events / service / products on your socials/blog, or creating photo and video content for them to use in their own marketing? I’ve been thinking about how I could do something similar in my city without depending on ad revenue.
It definitely is an option and one I’m exploring more of now that ad income is down. I know many content creators who make way more money than me on sponsored social media posts with brands. But they’re also (mostly) shilling trash and I can’t bring myself to do that. The real struggle is dealing with the fact that local businesses tend to not have a high marketing budget (if any), so the vast majority of inquiries are for coverage for food or a gift card. I’m rolling out some new options that could work, but I haven’t really found something that checks all the boxes just yet.