Travel Blog Income Report November 2024 – $3,580

November 2024 Travel Blog Traffic Report

Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of November was roughly 5,026 page views. This was a decrease of 13% on a per day basis from October and a decrease of 78% from November 2023.

We keep going down, and honestly there isn’t much else to say about this one as depressing as it is since we’re down 95% from our best month and are effectively just hobbling along on the site side of things.

On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in November was approximately 99,000 page views. This was an increase of 40% on a per day basis from October and a decrease of 55% from November 2023.

It looks like our local blog may have received a boost in the November core algorithm update, as our traffic was up considerably from October and, while still down YOY from 2023, is not as big of a drop as in past months. Still, when we have previously broken 200,000 page views for the month, coming just under 100,000 was still a bit of a gut punch despite having growth on nearly all of our associated channels.

November 2024 Travel Blog Income Report

Our booked income for November was approximately $3,580- down approximately 33% on a per-day basis from October and an decrease of 60% from November 2023. This income was approximately 95% from our local blog and 5% from our travel blog.

The breakdown includes the approximate following:

*CPM Ads: $2,715
*Affiliates: $555
*Facebook Bonus: $310

November was an incredibly depressing income month if only because we saw no real surge around Black Friday. No traffic increase. No ad revenue increase. No affiliate sales increase. Nothing. Where we normally see a jump of about 30% MoM from October to November, we actually saw a big decrease in November.

The silver lining here is this was primarily because we did not take on any new sponsored partnerships this month. That made up about 50% of our revenue from October, which ironically enough, if you remove then our passive revenue did hit our conventional 30% MoM increase that we normally would expect.

The good news here is that some things are looking up despite the darkness. We have had some of the best RPMs of the year and highest revenue weeks on our ad network. The downside is that, naturally, these are still only as good as some of our worst weeks in 2023.

All this tells us is that we need to make some changes in 2025 to incorporate more new revenue streams outside of ads, affiliates, and fleeting sponsored content as it is simply not sustainable at the levels we are working with right now.

November 2024 Expenses

Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of November were roughly $519 with the following breakdown:

*Programs: $400
*Advertising: $75
*Domains: $44

November is always a big month for us spending wise as many of our annual plugins and memberships are up for renewal as they were previously purchased during Black Friday sales. As such, an extra $300 on that end hit us, as well as several domain renewals as well.

Still, I am doing my best to drop our spending over time as we’re hitting a new floor of advertising (primarily for email leads) and I am cutting some unnecessary services/memberships and downgrading others as needed. It stinks to drop out of some professional orgs that I’ve been a member of for years, but if they’re not providing value, well, I can’t keep paying right now.

Either way, the big one is coming up in December with our server renewal!

*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.

December 2024 Goals

As things are still chaotic, with no real Q4 boost in sight, we’re just going to slowly wind down the year doing things the way we always have- producing great content. It may not be as effective as in the past, but the holidays are in full swing and the posts we make, locally at least, are still doing decently well- so full steam ahead on that end until the new year.

But as we look forward to 2025, we’re really not sure what the future will hold. Obviously income levels like November are not sustainable, especially in what has historically been one of the best months of the year.

As such, we’re planning on new items to roll out across our sites in 2025, skewed heavily to our local blog, such as new brand partnerships, an event series, a new sponsored directory on our site, products, and a whole lot more. It will be a big pivot, but we’re looking forward to spending a lot of January getting the finer details hashed out (plus a bit of work going on behind the scenes in December, too).

So full steam ahead as usual this month with a sharp pivot coming in January!

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.