Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on July 31, 2025.
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Welcome to the 125th 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.
July 2025 Travel Blog Traffic Report
Our traffic on Living the Dream for the month of July was roughly 6,500 page views. This was an increase of 36% on a per day basis from June and a decrease of 35% from July 2024.
Google’s latest algorithm update did something interesting- it increased traffic for a lot of publishers, particularly in travel. We have heard many reports from fellow bloggers of nominal rises in traffic, and our sites were lucky enough to receive some benefit.
We’re still down, well, 95% from our all-time high, but you know what? At this point any increase in traffic is a win, even if we don’t expect this one to hold long-term all the same.
On the Discover the Burgh front, our traffic in July was approximately 115,000 page views*. This was an increase of 17% on a per day basis from June and a decrease of 3.3% from July 2024.
Our local blog also had a nice increase in traffic from the algorithm update as well. Initially, we thought the traffic had spiked about 60% in the first days of the update, but has slowly started to fall back a little bit towards the end of the month.
Still, month-over-month we’re up about 20-30% on average, so we hope to see a slightly higher number in August if this normalizes out.
*Unfortunately, we also had a period of time this month where our analytics tracking was removed from our site due to a plugin issue, so we are extrapolating a bit on data here and being conservative in our estimates (of course it happened when traffic started to spike). We had about five days where our tracking was offline, so I’m estimating slightly based on the traffic before/after.
July 2025 Travel Blog Income Report
Our booked income for April was approximately $11,400 up approximately 110% on a per-day basis from June and an increase of 138% from July 2024. This income was approximately 95% from our local blog and 5% from our travel blog.
The breakdown includes the approximate following:
*CPM Ads: $3,050
*Sponsored Content: $5,020
*Affiliates: $2,500
*Social Bonus: $830
If you have been following along with these reports over the last few years, I think you can imagine my surprise here- I’m just as shocked as you are.
This has been an amazing month, and is perhaps our sixth best month of income ever.
Yes, it’s all the result of one sponsored campaign that came through with a negotiated amount that I would have been insane to say no to. And, as with everything, these are heavily variable and cannot be relied upon all the time.
That said, even without that we would’ve still had a pretty incredible month at around $6,380 on display ads, social bonus, and affiliates- showing gains in all three categories thanks to the rise in traffic from the algorithm update and our continued push into improving our social media reach.
If these hold, we’re likely on track to have a record-breaking year for income in sponsored advertising, affiliates, and social media bonus revenue, which would get one giant exhale from us! But we’re unfortunately not likely to have a record year of income overall, as our display ad revenue is still down almost 66% from our all-time best year.
But, who knows, maybe our book will be a hit and we’ll be in a completely different place come December! Still, I haven’t felt this hopeful in a while, and I’m going to take that win.
July 2025 Expenses
Our dedicated blog expenses* for the month of July were roughly $976 with the following breakdown:
*Programs: $300
*Advertising: $200
*Domains: $60
*Hosting: $105
*ISBNs: $295
*Instagram Certification: $16
We are still trying to keep our spending low, with our normal ~$600/month in expenses holding.
This month we had a couple extra purchases in the form of more domain names and a bulk ISBN order for our book, which increased our spending by about $350. Although the domain names will now be an annual expense, we’re going to be set on ISBNs for quite some time now since we got a 10 pack. Hooray books!
*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.
August 2025 Goals
August is going to be a big one for us, because we are just days away from announcing the sale of our local guidebook.
Yes, five years in the making, we are almost done- and I’m not just saying that as a procrastination thing. It’s done. The book is done. The cover is done. The domain names are bought. The landing pages are done. Everything is done except for a test print to verify that everything is formatted properly.
Once we have a paper copy in hand, which we should be ordering any day now, we will then put the book up for pre-sale for a launch in mid-September to early-October. Things are getting real!
As such, I suspect a fair bit of August will be work in support of the launch- scheduling release parties, meet and greets, negotiating wholesale orders, etc. But we will see. For now, I’m just calling hopefully getting a paper copy in hand and a set launch date my only two real goals for the month.
Anything else is just a bonus.
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.