Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on December 31, 2025.
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Welcome to the 130th 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.
December 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of December was roughly 12,400 page views. This was an increase of 18% per day basis from November and an increase of 135% from December 2024.
I’m not going to say that it feels like we’re turning a corner here, but with two months over 10,000 pageviews per month (a traffic figure we’ve not seen since early 2024), certainly feels like we have some form of momentum on our side.
We started 2025 off at just half the traffic we had in December, and our lowest month (June) was almost 1/3 of where we are now. So seeing this turnaround has been quite the surprise.
Still, we’re not holding our breath. Traffic fluctuations are the new normal these days, so things could just as easily fall apart as much as they could continue to rise. Still, we historically have seen a 20-30% jump in traffic MoM as January comes in due to it being a popular time of year to plan trips, so we’re cautiously optimistic for January!
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in December was approximately 141,000 page views. This was an increase of 36% on a per day basis from November and more or less the same as December 2024.
Our Q4 on Discover the Burgh was, ironically, almost a perfect match for 2024. We saw a nice uptick in traffic from November to December, which, while more or less identical to last year, still hit our target of breaking 100,000 pageviews for the month.
Unlike Living the Dream, Discover the Burgh often has a sharp drop in traffic in January when everyone in the city goes back to hibernating, so much like we’re holding our breath there on our travel site, we’re covering our eyes for this one.
December 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for December was approximately $8,455 an increase of 20% on a per-day basis from November and an increase of 72% from December 2024. This income was approximately 95% from our local blog and 5% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $5,500
*Sponsored Content: $100
*Affiliates: $2,000
*Book Sales: $480
*Social Bonus: $375
Although our traffic was only up slightly overall from 2024, our income saw a nice jump. Even better? Virtually none of it was due to sponsored advertising.
We admit that we are opening up to more sponsored content on our channels, primarily because it is a necessity these days, but we still treat that money as a bonus. It is, unfortunately, not consistent enough that we can bank on a multi-thousand dollar campaign every month (nor do we want to do that many sponsored projects, to be honest).
So when you take those out, we look at our more passive revenue streams as a floor, and we’ve had a darn good floor this month.
We know that our CPM advertising income will drop considerably in January, as it always does, but we’re really excited to see what our new floor will be come 2026. We really are hoping to make it be a new record year!
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.
December 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of December were roughly $716 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $250
*Advertising: $100
*Hosting: $120
*Instagram Certification: $16
*Books: $230
Our new floor of expenses has a new tier of book orders, as we want to have 20-50 on hand at any given time to fulfill local orders. We’ve reduced our advertising a fair bit on these sites as well, because, honestly, Meta isn’t doing much for us anymore, so why should we continue to pay them?
So we’re looking at this being our possible floor of spending for 2026, and, coupled with a cull in subscriptions that I plan to make in January, it’ll be interesting to see where we end up from there!
*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.
2025 in Review
2025 was a chaotic year, that ended up turning out to be chaotic good– we’re ok with that!
We started 2025 on the heels of one of our worst income years since 2020, and the prospects of a “good” year were, well, not looking so great. (No, seriously, we grossed just $875 more in 2024 than we did in 2020- oof.)
But our work on pivoting away from display ad revenue and more into sponsored content, affiliates, products, social bonus revenue, and more paid off. We had our best ever year in all of these categories, and our income was up 56% YOY. Not quite best year ever, but we were within a stone’s throw away from it all the same.
My original target was hoping to get sponsored content, affiliates, and display ads to be at an equal, 33/33/33, split, and I was pleasantly surprised to get them pretty close- 25/32/42 is pretty good to me!
We also released a book in late November which, while slow to start, has moved nearly 300 copies and we are in a prime position to get more distribution and large-scale contracts in 2026. So when our first product only made up about 1% of our 2025 income, we admit we’re not terribly upset- the future is bright there.
Our 2026 goal is going to be a 25/25/25/25 split between these four categories, and possibly even raising our social bonus revenue to try and hit a 20/20/20/20/20 split- but that is likely a stretch goal!
Still, diversification, both in terms of multiple sites (some not featured in this income report) and multiple revenue streams all came together for really making our business much stronger as we move into 2026.
January 2026 Goals
As you can guess from the above year in review, our 2026 goals are continuing on with our diversification of revenue. These will include more products, more sponsored content opportunities, perhaps hiring a sales manager to make that push, and more.
We are in good position to start lifting all categories across the board, and that will be the core theme for the year.
For January, we are going to spend the bulk of our time working on overhauling Discover the Burgh, as we are in desperate need of a redesign, with a large push on providing a better user experience for visitors who are planning trips- an area we’ve often lacked in the past. Throw on a renewed push to get our business directory loaded up, we have a lot that will keep us busy for the month.
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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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.