How Much Money Did I Make Blogging In 2024? | Johnny Africa

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 2024. 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.

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 2024?

I made roughly $12,000 USD in 2019, $18,000 in 2021, and $34,000 in 2022, $42,000 in 2023 from all my blogging activities. 2024 was a record year without a doubt. Everything seemed to be running well on my blog and I hit records in terms of traffic and revenues.

It’s been an incredible year full of travel and new experiences. I spent much of the year traveling to amazing places like Sri Lanka, Cape Town, Lombok, Greece, and more. 2025 will be an even more eventful year for travel for us I think.

I like to use a lot of images in my posts but for the purpose of this post, there aren’t many images that make sense. I will just include pictures of my travels in 2024 all throughout the post just to mix it up between long paragraphs of text!

In total, I made around $73k in 2024 which 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.

How much traffic did Johnny Africa receive in 2024?

2024 was a whirlwind year of crazy traffic spikes and crazy traffic crashes. With the endless amounts of Google algorithm changes, my traffic really plummeted at the end of the year as these Google changes destroyed small time blogging.

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.

My Traffic Numbers for 2024

In 2024, I saw my traffic wildly fluctuate. As the world reopened for travel, more and more people searched for travel related things again. In addition, my personal finance posts centering around options trading and other topics have generated significant amounts of traffic.

2024 started out great but completely crashed as the year ended. I had really amazing numbers getting almost 100,000 sessions a month at times before it completely crashed down to 1/4 of that number near the end of the year.

As you can see from this chart. There were many ebbs and flows. Traffic peaked in Q3 and dropped noticeably for the rest of the year before recovering in November. This is all due to Google’s search engine updates. Google rolled out various algorithm changes that negatively impacted my blog (as well as many other blogs that I’m friends with). I will go into more detail about this later.

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.

Google Core Updates in 2024 had huge impacts on blogging

When you’re in the blogging business, you are in the business of understanding and playing nicely with Google. Many people I come across thinks much of my traffic comes from social media like Instagram or Pinterest but that’s simply not true. Almost 80% of my traffic comes directly from Google search and I’d wager most of the travel bloggers in the world have a similar breakdown.

While many bloggers in recent years have tried pivoting their traffic sources to things like Pinterest, Facebook Groups, and email newsletters, it’s unlikely this really moves the needle more than the big G.

Simply put, Google is the most important thing to every blogger and is the one company you must understand the most to succeed.

In 2024, Google made many different changes to their algorithm. In fact, Google changes their algorithms constantly to adapt to the modern world. While the average person might not notice anything, it can make the difference between a successful blog and a non-existent blog.

AI came on to the scene in 2023 and really blew up in 2024. AI stocks rocketed to the moon and Google made many changes to keep up with the changing of the times. One of these major changes is the amount of AI and suggested content Google has added to their search results. If you search for something in 2024, it’s likely you’ll have plenty of Google suggestions, AI snippets, and sponsored ads before you even get to a single actual search result.

In addition, Google signed a big deal with Reddit in 2024 which gives preference and SEO favors to results from Reddit. I’m an avid user of Reddit and I’m guilty of directly searching for Reddit specific results on Google before so I understand where this partnership is coming from. However, a lot of the posts where I used to rank in the top 1 or 2 results are no longer the case as Reddit takes the top spot.

This means that I lost a lot of traffic starting from August of 2024 to the tune of almost half! It’s recovered a bit leading into the end of the year but I suspect this downward trend to continue into 2025 and beyond. Google has made huge algorithm changes for many years now. Somehow I’ve managed to make it unscathed in years past even as many small bloggers got decimated. My luck ran out in 2024!

From the blogger groups I’m part of, everyone has seen a massive decline in traffic and earnings. Simply put, old school blogging is a thing of the past and I think it’s only a matter of years before most bloggers are completely replaced by AI. I feel bad for some of the big players who derived their entire livelihood on their blogging earnings. It’s too late to pivot to something like YouTube for them so many had to go back and get “normal” jobs.

Thankfully, being financially independent, blogging was always a hobby for me and never money I really needed. Of course, it feels super nice to make the money and it is almost some sort of self-validation that I can create something and make real money from it.

RPMs remain relatively high

Even as my traffic plummets, RPMs remain high. RPM is how much money I earn per visitor. 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. 2024 has been a very strong year economically 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.

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.

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.

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 videographyFreelance writingBrand CampaignsE-booksE-CoursesSocial 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 2024?

As 2024 is coming to an end, I have tallied up my profits for the year. 2024 was the highest grossing year I had in blogging which was surprising as I never thought I would have eclipsed my 2023 numbers. Seriously, I am in shock at how much money I was able to make in 2024!

Traditional Advertisements through Ezoic and Google Adsense – $25,716

For 2024, I used Ezoic for the first half of the year before switching to Mediavine. Mediavine pays based on RPM which is dollars per thousand sessions. This fluctuates with seasonality but I average about $30-45 RPM depending on the time of year and the general trends of the market.

Adsense is largely paid per click on advertisements and the rate varies wildly depending on what category the company is.

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.

2024 was a great year for display ads as the economy rebounded and markets rode into all time highs. I found that my RPMs were quite good even as my traffic tanked due to Google algorithm updates.

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 $110 in 2024.

Affiliate Marketing – $11,406

This amount is the money I made from booking.com purely from placing links to accommodations on my most popular articles. 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. Everyone that I refer gets me roughly $600.

Travel Planning – $3,550

In total, I planned about 10 different trips in 2024. 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.

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 $150/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 – $73,000

All in all, minus expenses, I have cleared $73,000 in 2024. After my landmark year of blogging in 2023, 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.

The year really peaked significantly in the middle of the year before crashing back down to reality near the end of the year.

I really do not have any faith going forward in 2025 as Google algorithm changes and the AI will continue to progress all but rooting out small time bloggers like myself. The trend is already starting and I’m losing traffic day by day.

Thankfully, I’ve made money trading and investing in AI and other Tech stocks and will hopefully continue to do so.

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.

In addition, cyber security is a huge issue once you have more traffic. My website used to be hacked continuously when I was using Bluehost. I switched to Siteground two years ago and these cyber attacks have since stopped which has been amazing. Nevertheless, this could easily happen again and I can’t take anything for granted.

Outlook for 2025

My outlook for 2024 was to make around $40k and I easily eclipsed that. I was very surprised just how much money I made from blogging in 2024 but I just don’t see the good times lasting into 2025.

I am pessimistic about 2025 because of just how volatile Google’s updates are. The Google updates in 2024 really did a number on my blog and have destroyed the blogging business for small time publishers.

My traffic has decreased by 30-40% and I am just hoping this trend doesn’t continue in 2025. I will continue to publish travel content on my website but with the Advent of AI, Reddit, and video, I really do believe that old school blogging is a dying business. A lot of the big time travel bloggers have long ago pivoted to video and social media.

In the end, there’s no way to predict how Google will change their algorithms. The only thing someone can do is continue to produce good quality content and write informative blog posts with good SEO practices!

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

2024 was a pivotal year for the blogging (and society as a whole). AI really took root and Google has completely changed how it operates lending to a massive loss for small time bloggers. In addition, the whole world is heading towards more video based content. The younger generation doesn’t even use Google anymore preferring to search on TikTok or Instagram for whatever information they need.

Travel itself will continue to soar in demand but travel blogging is a thing of the past sadly. Google is giving extra favors to big websites like Reddit, TripAdvisor, Forbes etc. who pay Google for advertising. Coupled with AI snippets and sponsored links, you need to scroll for a few seconds before “regular” results even appear.

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.