Blogging has become a nice little supplemental income for me!

When I first began this blog, I had no expectations for it whatsoever. It was originally just my portfolio site for my work as an author and marketer, but during the pandemic, I decided to make a blog as a weird little outlet for my hobbies.

From there, it evolved into book and movie reviews, as I was consuming so much and then forgetting about it. I wanted this to become more like a digital archive for me, and then it started getting more and more attention throughout the years. Then I began expanding in theater, travel, and reflections on my career as a writer.

That’s when I began monetizing. At my highest moments, I was getting around 150,000 hits a month and making thousands of dollars off of it. I saw that as life changing money as a broke graduate student, but then Google also got in the way with their search engines. I am no longer making that much.

Running this website has truly been a rollercoaster of emotions. I’ll get into this later, but my peak growth began during the main Google HCU update that so many other bloggers saw as the end of their business. But in March, I got hit by another Google update, and ever since then my income hasn’t been as big as it’s been since that high moment.

It was because of that update I was able to get into a big publisher ad system like Mediavine, which was a complete game changer when it came to how much money I could make through this website.

Let’s get into the details in the section below, shall we?

In a year, I made over $6,000 in USD from my blog.

I implemented Google Adsense on my blog in June 2023, when I realized ad money was a thing and I could be making a passive income source. When I was on Google, the most I ever made in a month was about 70 USD. I was happy if I was making up to $5 in a single day sometimes.

It was when my traffic ramped up that I realized I could get into more premium ad networks. From June 2023 to June 2024, I ended up making a little over 6000 USD, with most of it coming from the premium ad networks like Mediavine. More on that below.

Mediavine truly was a game changer with its ad revenue.

I applied for Mediavine in January 2024, and had its approval within a week or two. By January 21, when I was coming home from a three week trip to Malaysia, I was already making some money off of my Mediavine ads.

While my RPMs (revenue per one thousand hits) with Google was only like 2 USD, my Mediavine RPM has consistently hovered at around 10-15 USD. I don’t run a profitable niche website, but my travel pages and whatnot tend to make more money than say a book review.

About 40% of my traffic is also from the US, which contributes to the lower RPM. I’ve seen some people making insane RPM numbers on their Mediavine sites, which means they’re making a lot of revenue whenever someone stops to watch the ad that hovers in the corner.

That said, Mediavine was the game changer with this blog. For example, I have a review of the first Dune movie on this website. When the second one was coming out, it was getting an insane amount of hits, and I made $1000 off of that one page alone in a month.

This shows the power of being in a premium network. More on traffic fluctuations below, but when my site got hit by Google’s search engine updates and AI, Mediavine income has been lower, but still much higher than what I ever received in a single day from Google Adsense.

Diversifying became very important to me.

In March 2024, I was finally hit by Google. I was getting around 4,000 clicks a day from Google alone, but because of their changes to search engine and the implementation of AI, it quickly dropped to around 1,500 clicks a day. That’s impacted my revenue as you would think it would, and I no longer saw the blog as a full time opportunity.

So in my free time I focused more on diversifying my content. I started uploading to Pinterest and Letterboxd in search of finding new opportunities to advertise my work and what I was doing not only as a blogger, but as a writer and former film critic at a big publication.

I also began to focus more on social media. I’m currently, at the time of typing this, making more reel content on my side Instagram account in an attempt to experiment and see what lands with audiences more.

Lots of opportunities are out there in the world, and I’m prepared to take them on!

It all can crumble very quickly.

The Google updates proved to me how unstable this career path is, especially if you fail to diversify your traffic and revenue streams. I saw a lot of bloggers shutter during this period, as they had no idea what to do when Google wrecked their traffic.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve still consistently been getting traffic, even with Google messing it up to the point where it’s more than 50% of what I once got. This is still a solid revenue source, even though I definitely cannot rely on it in a pinch.

So something to keep in mind is to diversify, as one update can ruin years’ worth of work in one night. I’ve written all of my work by hand, no AI, and hustled hard. But that doesn’t mean I or anyone else is safe from the updates.

Regardless, this has been such a learning opportunity, and I feel like I know so much more about SEO and blogging, as well as entrepreneurship, from this.

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