Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on May 1, 2025.
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Welcome to the 122nd 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 blogs in this report (one global travel and one local travel) 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.
Note: In July 2023, Google switched from Universal Analytics to GA4 reporting. We use custom templates to ensure we are still reporting on page views as our traffic metric; however, it is possible this figure is different slightly from the past.
April 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of April was roughly 5,150 page views. This was a decrease of 25% on a per day basis from March and a decrease of 65% from April 2024.
March’s Core Algorithm Update was neither kind nor unkind to our travel blog. While we had a big of a drop in traffic, it was not too much overall to suggest that we were impacted by an update either way.
Still, we crawl on.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in April was approximately 98,470 page views. This was an increase of 10% on a per day basis from March and a decrease of 10% from April 2024.
Our local blog seems to be bouncing back, however slightly, and is a night and day difference from our global travel blog. We are still down slightly YOY, but the drop is a lot less pronounced than in previous months.
Will we continue to see a rise or plateau here? It is hard to say, but at least we have some glimmer of hope for the time being.
April 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for April was approximately $7,200 up approximately 21% on a per-day basis from March and an increase of 29% from April 2024. This income was approximately 85% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $2,275
*Sponsored Content: $2,850
*Affiliates: $1,800
*Social Bonus: $275
My efforts to grow our sponsored content and affiliate revenue to offset ads showed remarkable growth this month, with sponsored content being our largest income stream by a decent margin.
Our new business directory and calendar have already exceeded our best year of revenue. We’re about to cross over our second best year of sponsored advertising revenue (hopefully in May) with our best ever target in sight for end of year 2025 (although, let’s be honest, I’ve never really pushed sponsored campaigns so that isn’t a huge figure).
We’re also likely to hit our third best month of affiliate revenue by the start of Q3, too.
This is all excellent news, considering that our CPM ad revenue is on track for its worst performance since 2017. Still, we’re excited to possibly get a book launch this summer, more products, and other fun ideas rolling to help shore up our revenue despite our lower-than-average traffic.
April 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of April were roughly $626 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $300
*Advertising: $175
*Domains: $30
*Hosting: $105
*Instagram Certification: $16
This was a pretty standard month for us expense wise. We had a few programs renew and signed up for more annual plans on services like ChatGPT, so we’re seeing a floor of spending right now.
*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.
May 2025 Goals
May is going to be a wild month for us for many reasons. First off, we’re out at the end of the month for another vacation. (Hooray!)
But also, we’ve had a lot of issues at home over the last few weeks that we’re dealing with. As such, our blog post output rate is going to be a lot lower this month since we’ll be working on those plus other side tasks like making more Reels, pushing sponsored campaigns, and finishing our book.
We hope to have the book at a place where its ready for its first test print by the end of the month. But I admit there is still a lot of work to be done before that point!
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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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.