Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on September 29, 2025.
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Welcome to the 127th 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.
September 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of September was roughly 6,900 page views. This was an increase of 2% per day basis from August and an increase of 11% from September 2024.
We’re still not going to sugar coat the fact that our travel blog’s traffic is, ahem, terrible. But we are seeing minor improvements as time goes on. We are up 11% year over year, which is encouraging, and September was our second best month of 2025 so far.
But considering the speed at which we publish new articles, we’re not really expecting a magical change overnight unless some outside factor helps change the game a little bit. Still, we have a ton of travel coming up, so we’ll be putting out content no matter what.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in September was approximately 108,800 page views. This was a decrease of 3% on a per day basis from August and an increase of 11% from September 2024.
Historically, we often see a drop in traffic from August to September which we likely attribute to a whole lot of things going on like back-to-school, football season starting (seriously, we have big drops on game days), and more.
So, while are down a bit month over month, it is our 11% year over year gain that is most exciting. Yes, we are still down about 45% from two years ago, but it does seem like we are moving in the right direction. So we are hopefully on track for a big Q4, at least.
2026? Well, that’s another question entirely.
September 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for September was approximately $6,415 up down 8% on a per-day basis from August and an increase of 78% from September 2024. This income was approximately 95% from our local blog and 5% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $3,015
*Sponsored Content: $650
*Affiliates: $2,350
*Social Bonus: $400
September was a good month income-wise all around. We saw a nice uptick in display advertising income, likely coinciding with rates rising as we get closer to Q4. But we also saw a decent affiliate commission breakout for the month which was encouraging as we normally see sales start to slow down towards the end of the year. So far, that’s just not happening yet.
Throw on some nominal sponsored content purchases and social bonus revenue on the backend and it was a pretty good month all around.
In fact, we’re now firmly in our best year ever territory for sponsored content, and we’re coming close to hitting our best year ever for affiliates, too (we should cross that threshold in November, most likely). But this comes with the unfortunate hit that display ad revenue is among the lowest we’ve seen since joining Mediavine in 2017.
Thankfully, we already beat 2024’s total gross income, and are on track for our fourth best year ever- and that is before we release our guidebook before the holiday shopping rush.
So while things still feel a bit nervous, we’re seeing the light and, more importantly, some breathing room.
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.
September 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of September were roughly $2,048 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $300
*Advertising: $200
*Camera: $641
*Equipment: $786
*Hosting: $105
*Instagram Certification: $16
We had two big pieces of equipment purchased this month, which really increased our spending significantly. Thankfully, these were both one-off purchases that I do not need to make again, so once we have them, we’ll be getting many years of work out of them.
My biggest was a new Insta360 camera with bike attachments for our ride to DC, which really helped us capture a ton of great content from on-trail!
We expect our spending to be rather high for the next few months, if only because we’re getting to the point where we’ll be increasing our spending in the lead up on our book!
*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.
October 2025 Goals
Good news! After a few months of delays, I about ready to order my first test copy of my Pittsburgh guidebook. While holding my breath on appropriate formatting before it arrives, this means we are counting down to a presale announcement that, we hope, will take place in October- just in time to get ahead of the holiday rush.
This means there will be a ton of work supporting the book this month, and I’m really excited for a change of pace as we move into Q4.
Apart from that, I have one if not two trips coming up for the month, with the first being a participant at TBEX Wichita for the Forum. So if you are heading out to the event, say hello!
I am also changing our ad network from Mediavine to Raptive in October, which will likely mean that I’ll be taking ads off Living the Dream but will be adding them on our wine blog which I do not track in this series. I expect my ad earnings on the local site to rise on its own, but that additional revenue on our other site will really help with growth on that end, which I am looking forward to.
From there, I really don’t have any other goals for the month. If the book could be released, or at least available for pre-sale, I will have one large exhale, and that’s really all I need right now.
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.