Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on June 11, 2025.
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Welcome to the 123rd 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.
May 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of May was roughly 4,710 page views. This was a decrease of 11% on a per day basis from April and a decrease of 60% from May 2024.
Another month, another traffic drop.
The only solace we have now is that search, which was the bulk of our traffic before the drop, has become a barren wasteland of irrelevant content and inaccurate AI slop. So, perhaps not being included in that is a good thing.
Still, we seem to be making a, proportionally at least, decent income for whatever traffic we have left. Just a shame that all the tools we now have at our disposal weren’t available when traffic was much, much higher.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in May was approximately 105,900 page views. This was an increase of 4% on a per day basis from April and a decrease of 3.6% from May 2024.
We are still holding our breath that our local blog is escaping a lot of the chaos, for the time being, as we are seeing nominal gains in traffic despite a bigger slump from two years ago.
Diversifying into other traffic streams has been key here, although we do tend to still rank quite well in search. We’re not deluding ourselves though- it is likely that AI hasn’t stolen all of our content yet.
May 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for May was approximately $6,980 down approximately 6% on a per-day basis from April and an increase of 28% from May 2024. This income was approximately 85% from our local blog and 15% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $2,678
*Sponsored Content: $1,300
*Affiliates: $2,710
*Social Bonus: $242
Well, we did it. Our affiliate revenue finally beat out our display ad income ever-so-slightly this month. I attribute a lot of this growth in income to Stay22 for creating new products that work in the background for us, and we’re really excited to hit the milestone where we have achieved 1:1 with ads (although, we do miss when ads earned us 3x more- just saying).
Still, coupling with a decent sponsored income month and modest social bonus revenue, we won’t be too upset all the same. We’re hitting a stride here that only seems to be going up- even if our traffic isn’t!
May 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of May were roughly $541 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $300
*Advertising: $120
*Hosting: $105
*Instagram Certification: $16
We’re still trying to keep our expenses low, so we’re hitting more or less our baseline for the time being.
*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.
June 2025 Goals
If you’re looking at this report regularly, you would see that we got this one out rather late (June 11th, instead of June 1st). This was primarily because we were traveling at the start of the month, and feeling a bit underwater and behind on everything once we got home.
So this month is going to be a bit of playing catch up. Getting through editing photos, working on expense reports, cranking out a spread of articles from all the drafts we put together on the road, and the like.
I will hopefully make a bit more progress on the book as well, but right now trying to stay afloat feels like all we can do.
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.