Another year has come and passed and what a year it was! It’s time to recount how much I made this year from blogging in 2025. In early 2020, I wrote a post about how much money I made blogging in 2019 which was my first foray into tracking how much money the blog makes. This goes into extreme detail about how I monetize my travel blog and exactly how much money I made in 2019. I won’t go into as much detail in this post because I’ll just be repeating myself from that post.
Since then I’ve been writing a yearly earnings report for my blog to recount the year’s activities, how much money I earned, how I did it, and much more.
- Johnny Africa Earnings Report 2021
- Johnny Africa Earnings Report 2022
- Johnny Africa Earnings Report 2023
- Johnny Africa Earnings Report 2024
This detailed earnings report is a real example of how I use blogging as one of the many passive income streams for myself and allowing me to live in amazing places like Bali for many months as well as travel to places like the Ritz Carlton Maldives!
What happened in 2025?
I made roughly $12,000 USD in 2019, $18,000 in 2021, and $34,000 in 2022, $42,000 in 2023, and $73k in 2024 from all my blogging activities. Somehow, someway, 2025 was a record year. Even with all the big changes happening in the old school blogging space, I was able to continue the successes of 2024 and even slightly eclipse the previous record!
It’s been an incredible year full of travel and new experiences. We had a baby in 2024 and decided to spend her first year of life traveling the world. We visited places like Australia, New Zealand, French Polynesia, Cook Islands, Cape Town, and more. We ultimately have settled in Bali which is in my opinion one of the best places to raise a child.
I like to use a lot of images and for this specific posts, I will simply attach a collection of travel posts from the year.
In total, I made around $76k in 2025. This was the highest I’ve ever made in any year while blogging and completely destroyed any records from previous year. This money didn’t come without its ups and downs as there huge changes to Google’s algorithm that really affected me and blogging as a whole. I will go into detail about these things later on in the post!
Pivoting my blog to Personal Finance
Writing about travel has always been my passion. However, I realized that personal finance has also been one of my passions. In 2020 and 2021, I’ve spent more time writing about personal finance including how I trade options, and manage my portfolio of stocks.
In 2020, I also pulled the trigger on FIRE (Financial Independence and Retire early) meaning I left my job and are now living on my investments! Essentially, I’ve stopped working early to focus on pursuing a life that I want to live. Of course, I could always go back to my old corporate job if I don’t find what I’m looking for. It’s all about having the choice to decide.
I decided that writing about personal finance in addition to travel was my next step for the blog. This has paid off quite nicely as this niche has added to my traffic and also the amount of money generated from my ads. Whether it’s about trading options, tracking net worth, or traveling the world for a year but still being able to increase my net worth.
I also do monthly portfolio summaries where I talk about what happened in the markets, what happened to my portfolio, how much we made in income and paid in expenses, and whatever else is on my mind. There is so much content about FIRE on the internet but it’s rare to see detailed day to day life content about those that have actually pulled the trigger.
How much traffic did Johnny Africa receive in 2025?
2025 was surprisingly pretty consistent. I thought my traffic would take a big hit at some point but the apocalypse that is AI and Google Algo changes has been kicked down the can another year. Google did not make as many major updates as they have in previous months and my traffic was pretty consistent in the 2.5k to 3k sessions per day range. Let’s see how long this can last.
Focusing on SEO and not so much on Pinterest
Google is still the name of the game. Anyone that blogs and looking to maximize traffic and income is just playing the Google SEO game. Organic search is the main driver of my traffic accounting for about 80% of the traffic. This means I focus on writing good quality articles with strong content, good keywords, and more.
I won’t get into too much detail surrounding keyword analysis but will just summarize that Google still accounts for the majority of my traffic.
In addition, Pinterest used to send me a lot of traffic but due to algorithm changes, Pinterest no longer is a viable traffic source. I still share things on Pinterest but not nearly as much as before.
I’m also tired of constantly adding pins from all my new posts. It’s a tedious and mind-numbing process that most bloggers consider outsourcing. This might be something I explore more in 2026 but the consensus is still out on whether Pinterest will be a reliable traffic source going forward.
My Traffic Numbers for 2025
In 2025, I saw my traffic be surprisingly stable. I think there were huge changes to Google in 2023 and 2024 that destroyed blogs but 2025 was somewhat stable. My travel posts continued getting good traffic with different posts taking the spotlight in different parts of the year. In addition, my personal finance posts centering around options trading and other topics have generated significant amounts of traffic.
2025 started out slow but picked up into the end of the year. Even with AI, Google algo changes, and everything else, my traffic was consistent throughout the year.
Of my published posts, much of my traffic comes from my biggest posts as you can see here. For example, my posts about Zion National Park, a Travel Planning Spreadsheet, and a guide to how to travel hack with credit cards average 150-200 views per post per day. With this type of traffic, it is enough to start making some money when it comes to advertisements and affiliate marketing.
How much traffic do you need to make money?
There is no one stop shop number for making money as a blogger. I started making money from Google Adsense years ago when I had maybe 200 pageviews a day. I made money but as you’d expect, it’s scraps compared to what I would make now (which is still scraps compared to the bigger bloggers).
I get about 2,500-3,000 page views a day but ideally, if I could get to about 10,000 pageviews a day, that’s when you can start doing some real revenue. This will probably never happen but you gotta dream big right?
This post is not about how to increase your traffic but merely how much money I make blogging. Perhaps I will write about that in the future because that would be multiple posts and thousands of words worth of content itself.
2025 was the year of AI
2024 was the year of huge Google core updates that threw everyone off their feet. 2025 was the year that AI went completely mainstream and took over even the most casual fan. Whether you’re using AI to write blog posts or a school essay, it’s consumed the minds of everyone involved.
I for one have noticed the decline of my writing capabilities. I’ve used AI to write quite a few things this year and I find I lose my ability to think creatively because I know that it won’t sound as refined and professional sounding as what ChatGPT spits out. AI still can’t really write perfectly “from the heart” so it will never replace my personal blogging voice, but everything else it damn well does.
Google has put a strong emphasis on AI answers which are conveniently located at the top of the search results drowning out traditional bloggers rankings. This has had a profound impact on everyone from bloggers to big businesses. While some of the answers are still iffy, it already answers 1/3 of the queries I throw into Google nowadays. In another year, this could be 50%, and so on and so forth.
The speed that AI improves is incredible. With Google’s warp speed changes and Reddit’s robust influence, I still believe that my days as a traditional blogger are numbered. I can see my blog earning good money for the next year or two before a massive decline where I will have to ride off into the sunset. I can’t complain too much because my investments are quite tech and AI heavy. This has done remarkably well in 2025 so ultimately the income from blogging will not be missed.
There is some hope for me
AI has put a lot of people out of jobs already, bloggers included. Even before AI blew up, Google changes and video were already coming for text bloggers with many websites losing 50% or more of their traffic.
Many people did travel blogging for a living and lived off the income they were able to generate year after year. In recent years, those same people had to get normal jobs again as they could no longer sustain the expenses and time needed to generate ever lower returns.
Blogs like mine can and will keep going as I do not do it for the money and it’s purely a passion project. AI sources its content from what it finds on the internet and the need for quality content will still be there even with a landscape with fewer contributors. I also suspect some people might get AI fatigue after awhile and crave the first hand, personal experiences that you can only find by visiting traditional blogs. People want that that human connection; to see beautiful pictures that can transport them to that destination before they visit.
I am optimistic that these things will help my blog going in 2026 and beyond .Let’s see, but a man can hope!
RPMs have declined in 2025
RPMs (Revenue per 1000 sessions) is the benchmark stat for determining how much money you’re making. RPMs are influenced by a whole host of factors like your website’s niche, target market (where your traffic comes from), content, and of course the overall economy. 2025, while a benchmark year for stock markets, saw overall economic weakness and consumer sentiment declined. I can’t say for certain exactly what affects RPMs but I saw a decline in my RPMs in 2025.
As I spent most of my year traveling around the world and a significant portion of it living in Bali, a lot of my new posts have been centered around Bali posts. Some of this traffic is from digital nomads viewing my posts from within Bali which means the revenue per view would be very low as it is from a country like Indonesia.
Countries like the US, UK and Canada pay the most per view. However, someone from the US viewing my post in Indonesia will not pay the same as someone viewing from within the US. 2025 has been a very strong year financially as markets went to all time highs on numerous occasions. Companies are generally comfortable spending on advertising which means that Google is still willing to pay.
Switching to Mediavine in 2024
In 2024, I finally made the switch to Mediavine as the network to manage my advertisements. Prior to this I was using a combination of Google Adsense and Ezoic which are well known names but nothing in comparison to the gold standard which is Mediavine.
This change was a long time coming as I had eyed moving to Mediavine for some time. Mediavine is a far superior product to Ezoic in my opinion and it also generates more money. I did a detailed comparison of Mediavine vs Ezoic after switching which really highlighted my experience with the two ad networks.
In 2025, Mediavine generated a consistent stream of ad revenue for me. However, as RPMs have declined, I’m unsure if Mediavine is still the best bet going forward.
How Do I Make Money Blogging?
Before I even start, I want to emphasize that like working out or dieting, everyone is different. Some core principals will apply to every blog but every blog has its own niche and the expertise of the blogger will dictate how they make money. So how I make money might not be the same way another blogger does.
For example, I’m not that big into social media. I guess I was just never into taking a million photos to get the “best shot” because I just like to be in the moment and enjoy my experience. While I like making reels and such, I find them to be too cumbersome and a bit too vain. Others are really into YouTube and make killer videos that get millions of views and generate serious income. I never got into that either.
Again, everyone has different ways of monetizing their work. Others with the same traffic stats as myself probably monetize their blogs better than me and I should probably learn from them. Nevertheless, I’ve figured some things out and this is purely how I make money.
For the most part, my methods of earning income has largely remained the same throughout the years. Advertisements and affiliate marketing are the primary ways I generate revenue while blogging.
Conventional Advertisements – Mediavine
Google Adsense is the go to platform for website owners to monetize their website with ads. After you’ve built your blog to have 10,000+ unique visitors a month, you can then utilize premium level publishers like Ezoic and Mediavine which optimize your ads infrastructure to generate the most earnings possible. Mediavine and Ezoic require at least 10,000 to 25,000 sessions a month. With this traffic, depending on your niche of course, you can probably generate $100-$500 a month with ads alone. Mediavine has changed their requirements to 50,000 sessions a month in order to qualify. This is double what they required in the past.
In 2024, I switched from Ezoic to Mediavine which was one of the best decisions I’ve made. I was with Ezoic for 5 years and I have nothing against them but Mediavine is just a much higher quality ad management network. Mediavine requires 50k sessions a month to qualify which I’ve hit for some time.
Sponsored Content
Once you’ve started blogging, it’s almost inevitable that you will start to get emails from interested parties asking you for rate cards wanting to know how much you charge for advertising. This translates to them trying to get you to share their content in exchange for a free product or money. I first started receiving such requests in 2015 and nowadays it is a bit overwhelming with the amount of requests of people looking to advertise on my blog.
Sometimes this means they request that I write an article reviewing a product with a link to their business in exchange for money. Others will send me a pre-written article that I can review and amend accordingly and then post it on my blog. Many bloggers and social media influencers receive a big chunk of their revenue from these methods. In fact, I’d reckon the biggest bloggers make the vast majority of their money with this method. For this, I generally charge $100 to $200 per article.
Other times, a travel agency will ask to advertise their company on one of my established posts. These posts are usually my best performing posts that rank in the top 5 on Google for certain search queries (Egypt Travel Itinerary). For these, there is no right amount to charge because it all depends on how much traffic the post gets. If I have a post that receives 100 pageviews or more a day, I will charge around $150-$200 per link.
I’ve had to start being choosy with who I do business with because you don’t want your blog to just be a bunch of advertisements otherwise you risk annoying your readers and increasing your bounce rate, which is usually seen as a negative with Google.
Travel Affiliate Programs
Travel affiliate programs are what most bloggers will say the meat of the money is. I would agree with most of them but it is also the most difficult. Essentially, affiliate marketing is convincing your readers to buy something from another company. You in turn, receive a % commission from your sale. It’s just online sales through your blog.
The most popular affiliate programs are booking.com, Amazon, Expedia etc. If someone uses your affiliate link to make a hotel reservation on booking.com for example, booking will earn a % commission from the hotel and give you a % of Booking’s commission. It’s usually around 4% of the total booking price. So if your reader used your link to make a hotel reservation for $1,000, then you receive $40 cash. You can see how this could snowball quickly if you have the right marketing strategy and traffic.
My booking link is https://www.booking.com/index.html?aid=1616432 with the 1616432 ID as my personal affiliate ID. When someone uses this link to book their accommodation, I will earn a percentage of the sale.
In 2025, I joined a startup called TravelPayouts which is a service that partners with booking.com, Agoda, Expedia, GetYourGuide, Viator, TripAdvisor and more to give your blog the ability to implement links for all these networks. They also utilize AI to automatically add your affiliate links to relevant blog posts which helps increase revenues. So far, I’ve been able to increase my earnings vs just using booking.com by a factor of 2x. Let’s see if this will continue in 2026.
Alternatively, if your blog specializes in travel equipment, fashion, or something involving buying lots of goods, Amazon would be perfect. Anything your reader buys from Amazon using your affiliate link will be a % commission to you as well. I know bloggers that make a killing using Amazon to sell goods like travel backpacks. But my blog is just not geared towards that and I have largely stayed with booking.com for my affiliate program.
Bespoke Services
Many bloggers offer some bespoke service or goods that their readers can purchase. For fashion bloggers, this might be their own line of products or for financial bloggers, it could be e-books or personalized services. This can literally be anything that you may think could be profitable. My favorite are the bloggers (successful ones let’s be clear) that offer “how to start a blog” classes to other people for a hefty price knowing full well that most of those people will never be successful. Popular ways are the following:
- Photography and videography
- Freelance writing
- Brand Campaigns
- E-books
- E-Courses
- Social Media Management
For me it was organizing trips, specifically honeymoons. This was not really planned but merely something I fell into. I planned a friend’s honeymoon in 2018 to South Africa, had them write a detailed post about it and now when you Google “South Africa Honeymoon Itinerary“, it is the first result! Since then, I have planned numerous other honeymoons from my readers.
How Much Money Did I make blogging in 2025?
As 2025 is coming to an end, I have tallied up my profits for the year. 2025 was the highest grossing year I had in blogging which was surprising as I never thought I would have eclipsed my 2024 numbers. Seriously, I am in shock at how much money I was able to make in 2025 with how the landscape has changed!
Traditional Advertisements through Mediavine – $24,005
For 2025, I used Mediavine for the entire year for my display ads. RPMs have declined overall for me. I’m not sure if that has to do with Mediavine as much as it has to do with my traffic concentration. In years past, a lot of my traffic were concentrated more on my US travel and finance posts which generally have higher RPMs. As I live in Bali now, I’ve produced much more Bali content and many of the viewers of these posts are within Indonesia which has much lower RPMs. Overall, I’m hovering just below $30 RPM ($30 per 1000 sessions) which is definitely lower than in years past.
Both services pay me using direct deposit monthly which makes for stable predictable earnings.
Mediavine pays out ad revenue based on your RPM which is calculated based on your blog’s niche, where your visitors come from, and the general state of the advertising space. Visitors from countries like the US, Canada, UK, AU generally pay the highest and places like India, Nigeria etc. pay the least. I suspect this has to do with spending power and GDP per capita of the countries involved.
Certain niches are just more profitable than others like finance, home and gardening, automotives, etc. The profitability of niche’s also change year on year based on the current trends of the world. Travel generally performs quite well and performed exceptionally well in 2021 when the world was opening up whereas it performed very poorly in 2020 when the world was locked down. Conversely, personal health and personal finance performed very well in 2020 when people had nothing to do but stay home and read about health.
Sponsorships – $43,050
I try to work with a few people that want to sponsor products on my website. This usually means they compose a blog post (or can pay me to compose something) in the form of a travel orientated article, and it can be to influence a product.
Overall, I work with various different travel companies and charged around $100-$200 per post depending on the content and request. I’ve since increased the minimum amount I accept to $125 in 2025.
Affiliate Marketing – $7,346
This amount is the money I made from using programs like Booking.com affiliates and TravelPayouts. These services will pay me if I refer them to booking a hotel/experience with their platform. When someone clicks that link, they will be transported to the hotel page on booking.com where if they book, I will receive the commission. This is not the easiest way to monetize a blog and requires some serious traffic to really make it meaningful because it’s likely 99% of readers won’t actually book the accommodation you’re promoting.
Also, most bookings are quite small commission (under $20) but every now and they you get a unicorn that books a super fancy hotel in Turks and Caicos garnering a commission of $150.
In addition, I also write a lot relating to credit cards. I generate referrals based on readers clicking on my referral links to various credit cards. My most successful post talks about how to get multiple itineration of the Chase Ink credit cards which have huge sign on bonuses. This was an amazing source of revenue in 2024 and 2023 but in 2025 this gravy train came to an end. Chase disallowed individuals to open more than one Chase Ink card thereby closing this loophole.
Travel Planning – $1,800
In total, I planned about 6 different trips in 2025. Most of these trips were honeymoons to South Africa costing between $8,000 to $12,000 including flights with hotels (eligible for booking.com affiliate) being roughly $4,000 to $8,000. I get 4% commission from Booking.com so this averaged out to be around $150-300 per honeymoon. I also add a flat planning fee to each trip which ranges from $250-$350. I actually quite enjoy this and it’s been quite fun to talk to so many people.
I think if I spent more time on this category, I could probably expand it and make it a much bigger business than what it is. Let’s see what the future brings!
Here are some examples of the trips I’ve planned around Africa.
- Niv and Avi | Three Weeks in Southern Africa: Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Garden Route, Safari, and Mauritius
- Lauren and Brandon | The Perfect South Africa and Mauritius Honeymoon
- Marissa and Albert | South Africa and Zanzibar Honeymoon
- Susana and Eric | South Africa and Victoria Falls Honeymoon
Expenses – ($400)
As far as expenses go, there really aren’t many to speak of. I’m not creating a physical product of any sort. The only things I pay for regularly are my domain name ($15/yr), hosting (about $300/yr), and some premium WordPress plugins. I think as the blog grows, there is room for more premium WordPress plugins like a newsletter management system but for now, it is unnecessary.
In recent years, I’ve spent more on hosting because my blog has gotten large enough when I need more space and bandwidth. I also want a faster host which helps improve Google Core Web Vitals which measures the speed of the website. In 2024, I switched my hosting to Cloudways from SiteGround to save money and improve the functionality of my website.
In 2024, I purchased a few premium WordPress plugins that hopefully improve the site experience and generate better SEO (but the verdict is out on that one) and spent a total of $100.
Total blogging profits – $76,000
All in all, minus expenses, I have cleared $76,000 in 2025. After my landmark year of blogging in 2024, I never thought I would increase my profits beyond that! Given that the year saw so many ups and downs with Google core updates and the whipsaw of the economy, I feel very good for the amount Johnny Africa blog made.
After all, 76k USD net income is equivalent to a $120k salary in New York City, or a 120k Euro salary in a major European city. While the former is easily obtained, the latter in Europe would be quite difficult to achieve. Not bad for work I view as a “hobby” and not being confined to an office.
2025 was a stable year of revenue generation with a nice pickup into the year end. The year really peaked significantly in the middle of the year before crashing back down to reality near the end of the year.
I feel like I could potentially sustain my trajectory in 2026 as all signs of the apocalypse have never come to fruition. However, it’s usually when you think everything can’t go wrong that they do. I think AI will continue to butcher traditional bloggers but I’m not sure to what extent. I do think that a lot of old school text bloggers have lost significant traffic/revenue and have given up their passion. Many have gone back to a traditional job. Since I am financially independent, blogging has always been my hobby and I can continue going for as long as I need.
Can you make a living off blogging?
Well it all depends on you. Now that you know how much money I made and how much work went into it, do you think you can replicate it and take it to the next level?
$75,000 in cash is a crazy amount of money for doing something I really enjoy, but is it enough to actually travel and live off? For many budget travelers, this is already an insane amount to live off of in one year. Others who are more into luxury won’t see this money last half that time. For myself, $75,000 is more than enough money to live a good life and is even getting to the point that it can be enough to live very comfortable life for a family. After all, I was living the good life in Bali for about $2,000 a month.
Thankfully, I don’t need to decide as I also have plenty of income coming from my investments thanks to my pursuit of Financial Independence. In addition, I also sell options on the side as a way to earn extra income. I would not recommend trading options to people that aren’t familiar with financial instruments. However, I do believe that selling covered calls on high quality names is among the lowest risk investments you can have with options.
Blogging income for me is nice but ultimately it’s just a byproduct of doing something that I already enjoy. Earning money and increasing traffic is just a method of self-validation that I’m actually succeeding in doing something on my own.
This posts focuses purely just how much money I make with the methods I’m familiar with. There are a million ways to make a buck in the blogging business and these are just the ways I’ve discovered and have found success. Other bloggers choose to focus on Social Media like Instagram or YouTube but this not something I’ve been able to succeed in nor is it something I plan to focus on in the future.
As a small time blogger, I don’t really see a future for blogging going forward and I would tell those looking to get into the blogging scene to re-consider or try doing video content instead. Even video however is full of competition and you’ll need to do a crazy amount of work to get any money.
Money is not guaranteed
Blogging is an industry that’s only really come into the forefront in the last decade and therefore, the money earned from internet blogging is very volatile. Just because I earned $x one year does not mean I will continue to earn this.
So much of my traffic is dependent on Google that any change in search algorithm in their world could completely change my traffic for the worse. I have no control over how Google evolves their search algorithm so I can only adapt when the changes come. I’ve seen Google’s algorithm completely ruin my organic search traffic with it taking months to recover.
How about taxes on my income?
Before I delve into this topic, I am not a tax expert by any means so please do not take this as anything more than a blogger rambling his thoughts online. As I am American, this advice is ONLY for US citizens. If you’re American, once you start making above a certain amount, you’ll need to pay taxes on your income. Blogging as a business will fall under the schedule E “business” income.
This means you can claim deductions relevant to your business. In this case, if you are blogging and you view yourself as a “business”, then you can claim deductions for your travel related activities. This is because your travels will lead to blog posts, which will then lead to you earning money from advertisements, sponsorships or whatever.
As I live full time outside of the USA, I am eligible for the FEIE (Foreign Earned Income Exclusion) which is around $130,000 for 2024. Since I earned far less than this deduction, I do not need to pay any taxes on my income. The $75,000 I earned is net income which is fantastic for me. This is akin to earning a $130,000 gross salary in a place like NYC. Being able to earn this money living anywhere I want is absolutely game changing!
Closing Points
2025 was a great year of blogging and the demise brought on by AI or video did not occur. I churned out content and my best performing posts performed well throughout the year. While my RPMs went down, my overall revenue increased slightly from 2024.
I suspect 2026 will bring challenges to the blogging sphere but I have an optimistic feeling that if I survived 2025, I could potentially be in the clear.
I continue to blog out of passion and interest but the good days of earning a living from blogging are over. I feel bad for the many bloggers I’ve seen that have had to go back to a “normal” job but that’s just how it goes.
