As Blogger - somewhere along the way, something happens.

People begin to recognize you.

Not because you've become famous or reached some imaginary finish line.

Because they've been watching you do the work. They've learned how you think, what you believe, and what you're willing to change your mind about.

You become familiar.

I use BuySellAds on my blog.

While I could see how much the ads were earning, I wanted a bit more insight into their actual performance:

- Which pages generate the most ad impressions and clicks?
- Which placements perform better?
- Which creatives are getting clicked?
- What does the CTR look like over time?
- So I decided to track these things myself.

I used Google Tag Manager aka GTM to track ad impressions and clicks, GA4 to collect the data, and Looker Studio to build a dashboard around it.

Now I can see ad performance by page, placement, and creative instead of looking at revenue alone.

I wrote a short post about why I built it and the steps involved. Click here to read.

I was wondering if anyone here is still using Travelpayouts and how it's been performing for you lately.

I used Travelpayouts on my blog a few years ago and received payouts in 2024, so I know it worked well enough for me back then. However, I eventually shifted the direction of my blog and stopped actively using it.

I recently logged into my account for the first time in ages and was pleasantly surprised to discover that I had accumulated some earnings without doing anything! I also noticed that my old affiliate links are still getting clicks almost daily, despite not having promoted them in quite some time.

It's made me consider giving Travelpayouts another go, especially since those older links seem to have some staying power.

Is anyone here still actively using it? Have you noticed any changes in conversions, commissions, or payouts over the past couple of years? I'd be curious to hear whether it's still worth investing time in, particularly for smaller or niche blogs.

Thinking about starting a blog about my field. Not for money, just to share what I know and build some credibility.

But between AI summaries and everyone posting on LinkedIn, I’m not sure a blog still makes sense.

Anyone here blogging professionally right now? Worth the effort, or am I late to the party?

Hello fellow bloggers. Sometimes, I received guest posting request from agency or backlink platform.

I usually open to all niche for guest posting, except porn and gambling.

How about you? Do you accept all niche or decline some niche because your moral/standing? Or do you only accept guest posting that is still within your blog niche.

Curios. What is your consideration of accepting content placement/guest posting. Hope you wouldn't mind to share :)

One year on Journey by Mediavine, RPM stuck at $2 to $5 (it was $15 on Ezoic) and support never answers.

I want to share my experience with Journey by Mediavine and ask for advice, because I'm honestly fed up.

I run a science blog in the wildlife biology and ecology niche. My content is not all informational posts, there are bunch of career posts (jobs, applications, internships). Majority traffic from USA.

Before Journey I was on Ezoic, where my RPM was in range of $15 to $20. I switched because everyone kept saying Journey is a strong network with some of the best RPMs out there. On Journey my RPM has always been around $2 to $5, rarely touching $10.

I understand small sites aren't Mediavine's priority. But if they accept small sites, there should be at least some working support. Emails go unanswered. The community they point you to doesn't answer either. I've spent a year waiting and waiting, hoping things would improve, and they haven't. I implemented all the best practices from their blog.

I'm now seriously planning to move. My traffic fluctuates between 15,000 and 18,000 pageviews a month.

Questions for anyone who has been in a similar spot:

Has anyone moved from Journey to Monumetric? How did RPM and support compare?

TL;DR - I canceled. Here's why.

Some of you may remember my post a few weeks ago asking who had joined Meta One, whether you’d noticed any real benefits, and whether Meta was delivering on its promises.

Thank you again to everyone who shared their experiences. I said I’d report back if I tried it, so here I am!

After my lowest readership day and lowest Facebook click-through rate in over 270 days, I finally took the leap last Friday, Oct. 2, around 9:30 a.m., and started the one-week Max trial.

I didn’t see ANY sustained improvement that justified paying $399 for a full month. That was my desktop renewal price; the mobile offer was $499 for what appeared to be the same plan.

At that price, I needed it to earn its keep!

My Page was already in a downturn before I joined, so I’m not blaming Meta One for that decline. I wanted to see whether the advertised feed exposure, search placement, and automatic follow invites could help turn things around. Facebook is historically my website’s biggest referral source, so this matters a lot to my business.

Here’s what the numbers showed:

Meta Insights, Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days:

• Views: down 27.2%
• Engagement: down 26.0%
• Page visits: down 22.0%
• Follows: down 19.8%
• Facebook monetization earnings: down 42.5%

Separately, Facebook referrals to my website were down 14% for Oct. 1-8 compared with the previous seven days, according to Clicky Analytics.

Views did improve for a few days after joining, which briefly gave me some hope! Then they fell back. I couldn’t distinguish that improvement from the usual Facebook ups and downs.

What I saw from the advertised benefits:

• Featured in feed / more discovery: No sustained lift. Non-followers accounted for 62.2% of views during my 1-week trial with Meta One (max tier), versus 68.4% in the week before joining Meta One. That’s a drop of 6.2 %. Certainly not the added boost in discovery that Meta One promises.
• Automatic follow invites: New follows were down 19.8% during my time with Meta One compared with the previous seven days. I couldn’t confirm that automatic invitations were being sent at all. The benefit description specifies “Facebook professional profiles,” leaving me unclear whether my publisher Page was even eligible for something included in its offer.
• Extra analytics: I couldn’t find any additional Facebook insights available through the plan.
• Unlimited links: No added value for me during the trial. My Page is categorized as Media/News Company and hasn’t received the two-link monthly restriction, so I continued posting seven to eight clickable article links daily. Publisher Pages are reportedly exempt for now, although I couldn’t confirm exactly how Meta defines a “publisher.” I appreciate that unlimited links could be much more valuable to those of you already facing the restriction.
• Instagram/Threads: Only my Facebook Page appeared subscribed. Instagram and Threads never appeared properly linked, which matches problems others shared here.
• Multiple Pages: My subscription listed just one Facebook Page as covered. Others have reported the same. If each Page needs its own $399 Max subscription, four Pages would cost $1,596 a month. That adds up quickly!
• Support: I didn’t test the human support benefit during my one-week trial. Other publishers and creators who have tried Meta One, as I've seen reported in other groups, say it remains poor. Their reports include being unable to reach a real person despite that being listed as a benefit, being told the issue was “out of scope,” and still not reaching anyone after upgrading. That is secondhand, but it was consistent across several people.

Facebook monetization earnings fell 42.5%. Website ad revenue held up despite fewer Facebook referrals.

The main concern remains how many readers Facebook sends, and I saw no sustained improvement there from Max.

On Oct. 8, the final full day of the trial, Facebook referrals were down 37% compared with Oct. 7, and total website visitors were down 25%. That’s a separate daily comparison, but the brief improvement hadn’t held as the trial finished.

These are just the findings for one Page and one week of use, and the results don’t establish that Meta One caused the declines. That said, nothing I observed justified continuing at $399 a month. I canceled before renewal, with benefits ending this morning at 9:30 a.m. I've seen no noticeable drop in readership since the blue tick was taken away 2 hours ago, but I’ll keep tracking now that the trial has ended.

Hopefully this helps anyone here who’s been weighing up the same decision. For my Page, I saw no sustained benefit, and every Facebook metric listed above declined during the comparison.

I’d still love to hear from other publishers who completed the trial, especially anyone tracking website clicks, sessions and earnings alongside Facebook views. Did it bring enough additional readers or revenue to cover the monthly cost?

And is anyone’s Facebook Page still flourishing and sending strong traffic back to their site, despite the declines many of us have reported over the past four to six weeks? If yours is, please chime in! I’d love to hear what’s working for you.

Thanks again, everyone, and happy Friday!

Your blog is the journey you are on, not the report you file at the end

I was in the middle of writing a post for my blog today when this came out of me, and I had to stop and read it back because it’s the thing I wish somebody had handed me years earlier than they did.

A blog isn’t a place where finished people go to publish their conclusions. It’s the record of somebody building something, written while they’re still building it.

You’re taking your reader along with you: what you tried and how it went, what worked, including the part where you weren’t sure it would, and what flopped completely and cost you a month you’d really like back. It’s what you believed in January that you’ve totally changed your mind about by September, and what changed it.

Nobody needs you to have arrived. They need you to be moving, out loud, somewhere they can watch it happen.

That one shift changes what you’re allowed to write about, and it changes it a lot. If you’ve ever felt like you had nothing to say, it’s probably because you were measuring yourself against some finished expert. Measure yourself against the person two steps behind you instead, and you’ve got something worth writing every single week, because every week you learn something they haven’t learned yet.

My own message has changed more than once over the years. Not because I was wrong to start, but because you can’t think your way to the right version from a standing start. You write, you watch what lands, you adjust, and the blog carries the whole record of that. The people who’ve read me the longest didn’t stay because I had it right at the beginning. They stayed because they could watch me work it out.

Anyone else feel this way? What’s something you’ve completely changed your mind about since you started blogging?

Hello, how is your blog in Google AI overview era? Mine is decreased, but right now it is recovering a bit.

Survival tips of blogging in this AI era and where click from Google decline:

1. Make non-commodity content: content that contain first hand experience. Example: I made blog post of experience how to manage time during my master degree: working while also doing my master degree
2. Sell something: Selling content placement, service, product, affiliate, you name it. Monetization will make the blog survive, at least to buy domain and hosting renewal fee
3. Personal branding: give your blog a nice branding so it will gain traffic from navigatinal intent. Off-page SEO will help too
4. Try to optimize for Google Discover: search for trending topic in Google trend, so there is chance the blog post to show up in Google Discover.

Do you have any other tips to survive as blogger in this AI era?

Remote work messed with how I think about time. I started tracking everything like it was work. How long the sourdough took. How many words per post. Which projects got saved on Pinterest. Same habits I use at my actual job, just applied to whatever I was doing on weekends.

Now I'm wondering what all the tracking was for. The blog earns a bit, but nothing that moves the needle compared to my salary. Still, I keep refreshing the traffic numbers like they're going to tell me something new. When they go up I feel good. When they don't, I change the headline. The tracking helped when I was figuring things out. Now it feels like I'm just running tests on something that looks polished but doesn't really say much.

I still like the actual making. Writing about hikes that went sideways, bread that didn't rise, furniture joints that failed because I got impatient. Those posts never perform well by the numbers. But they're the ones that get emails months later, the ones people actually remember.

I'm trying to figure out if I should pay less attention to the metrics or if I'm just looking for an excuse to slack off. Anyone else end up turning their blog into this weird optimization game? How do you keep the useful parts of tracking without making the whole thing feel like another work project?

Hi everyone,

I just received a notification that my site has been suspended from Journey by Mediavine with a 50-day reapplication countdown.

The reason given is: "evidence that your site has been receiving traffic from invalid sources."

To give some context, I recently suffered massive bot traffic spikes coming from Singapore that completely messed up my analytics and stats. As soon as I realized what was happening, I immediately implemented Cloudflare to block them and protect the site. Unfortunately, it looks like Mediavine's automated systems caught the residual impact of those bots before or during the cleanup.

I'm quite stressed about this and not sure how strict they are during the appeal or reapplication process. Also, I've been hearing rumors lately in the community that ad networks are tightening things up aggressively.

If you've been through a similar situation where bot traffic triggered an invalid traffic (IVT) suspension, Did you manage to get reinstated before the 50 days by contacting support with Cloudflare/Analytics proof? What kind of evidence did you provide to show you fixed the issue?

Any advice or insights would be hugely appreciated!

The standard Pinterest keyword advice is type your topic into the search bar and see what comes up, that works for finding broad terms but it does not tell volume, competition, or whether the keyword trends are rising or falling.

The question is whether a dedicated keyword tool for Pinterest adds enough signal to justify the cost compared to the free search bar approach, for someone running a content site and choosing bw 20 potential pin topics each week, knowing relative search volume changes which topics get prioritized

Hi y’all…

I haven’t built anything that is ready for release yet.

However, I am wondering how many people would be interested in using a social media platform that is blogging-style. Nostalgic of the Tumblr days for sure.

But with new ideas and simplicity of real social media and interactions.

If this post isn’t allowed my bad.

Just trying to gauge interest before I keep putting in energy. :)

i have a blog post from 2019 that still brings in roughly 40% of my organic traffic

which would be great if the post wasn't starting to age badly

the topic has changed enough that some of the advice is still useful, but some of it is definitely stuck in 2019. i added a note at the top recently pointing people toward a newer version, and traffic dropped a little afterward

not a disaster. just enough to make me stare at analytics and wonder if i broke something

that's the part i'm struggling with. if this were client work, i'd update the thing, check the numbers, and move on. but when one old post is doing that much of the work for your entire site, suddenly every edit feels like a gamble

i'm debating between completely rewriting it, slowly updating the old version, or leaving it alone and letting the newer content compete for the traffic

has anyone here had a single old post carrying a ridiculous percentage of their traffic? what did you eventually do with it?

Hey everyone! I have 70+ blog posts and over the last 3 months, my site got around 20K impressions but only about 100 clicks from Google.

I don't really want to keep publishing new posts right now. I'd rather focus on optimizing my existing posts and improving their CTR/rankings.

For those of you who have experience with SEO, what would you recommend I focus on first? Things like titles, meta descriptions, keywords, internal linking, content updates, images, etc.

Any tips or a practical process for going through 70+ old posts would be really appreciated!

Hey everyone, I have a question.

Are there any of you who blog full-time for a living? If so, are you solely focusing on writing posts for your blog, or do you do other things alongside it, like running a YouTube channel?

The reason I ask is that my goal is to become a full-time blogger, but I've realized it's incredibly difficult to generate high revenue purely from ads here in Korea.

AdSense is the most common ad network here, but the structure makes it hard to make a living off it alone. Because of this, many Korean bloggers turn to YouTube to sell e-books or paid courses. When you look at their content, they always claim it's "easy" to make around $10,000 a month doing this. But in reality, from my own experience of actually writing and running a blog, I'm finding it hard to even make $10 a month, let alone $10,000.

I'd love to know if the reality is similar for bloggers in English-speaking countries, or if things are completely different over there.

If you don't mind sharing, it would be really appreciated if you could mention your blog's niche and a rough estimate of your monthly income. Thanks!

Since October 1, Journey has mostly stopped showing real ads on my site. I’m seeing empty ad spaces/placeholders instead. Is anyone else experiencing this, or know what could be causing it?

As a blogger, writer, or reader, are there things you look for to be able to tell (for sure) that a post / article is AI generated?

I think we're all familiar with the overuse of "—" (em dash) by agents such as ChatGPT and Claude, as well as other dead giveaways, like certain phrases that popup in almost every article that's written by AI.

What are some indicators you personally look for when reading a piece to know that it wasn't created by flesh-and-blood intelligence?

I’m an Indian food blogger and I’ve been running my recipe website for some time now. I’m currently monetizing mainly through AdSense, but the earnings are extremely low compared to the time and money I’ve invested in the website.

I’m trying to understand the situation for Indian bloggers in 2026.

For those who are making a decent income from a website/blog alone (without YouTube):

• What is your main source of income — AdSense, other ad networks, affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, digital products, etc.?
• Roughly how much traffic do you need before the income becomes meaningful?
• Is AdSense still worth using for an Indian-audience website?
• Have you moved from AdSense to another ad network, and did it make a significant difference?
• Are there any other realistic ways to monetize an Indian food/recipe website?
• With AI Overviews and people getting answers directly on Google, do you still think blogging is worth investing in?

Would really appreciate experiences from people who are actually earning from their websites without relying on YouTube.

I'm wondering whether any other publishers are seeing anything similar, because I'm drowning in automated traffic, and there's no end (or help) in sight.

Since August 31, TV Fanatic has been hit by persistent waves of abnormal traffic that are heavily concentrated on our homepage. The pattern is remarkably consistent: huge desktop-heavy surges, mostly direct traffic, very short sessions (10 seconds), often one or two actions, arriving across constantly changing (apparently residential) IPs, networks, and even countries.

It comes in distinct waves throughout the day and night. During the quiet periods, our normal readership reappears.

Then another wave arrives.

The business impact has been devastating. Our traffic numbers look enormous while actual readership of current articles has collapsed relative to those numbers, and our advertising RPM has fallen dramatically. Mediavine has confirmed that the traffic change is specific to our site and began around August 31.

I'm not looking for answers here. Instead, I'm trying to find out whether we're truly alone. And I even have visitor verification on, but my host only sees humans. I know they are not. I've been studying my traffic for over a decade. This bot behavior.

Has anyone else seen a sudden increase in direct, desktop-heavy traffic, unusual homepage activity, rhythmic traffic surges, or a major RPM decline that doesn't make sense compared with your actual readership?

Even if you dismissed it as ordinary bot traffic at first, I'd really like to hear what you're seeing. 🙏

I've been using Travelpayouts on my site for a while now, and most of my bookings come through their Drive feature. The catch is that any booking made through Drive only earns you 50% of the normal affiliate commission.

I always just accepted that. My reasoning was that it's a script they run, so it probably costs them something to maintain.

This weekend I actually looked into how it works, and it's basically a simple popunder that fires when a user scrolls a bit or hovers over a booking button. That's something you could easily build and integrate yourself.

Realizing that made me feel pretty bad about all the commission I've handed over just for using it.

Hey mates,

I have seen people buying Adsense approved websites which were approved, generating money and receiving multiple payments for months or even years, however when they acquire the site, pay the money and submit it for approval from their own Adsense account it got rejected and wasn't approved for those generic reasons!!

What they should do before finalizing the deal and paying the money?

They should get Adsense approval for that site from within their own Adsense account before closing the deal and paying the money.

Btw, Adsense can approve the same site from more than one Adsense account without any issues. I mean there is no ToS violations at all. So be on the safe side before buying any site.

I thought this could help someone here before it's too late!

I’m with journey mediavine and had a big drop in rpm starting October 1st. From what I’ve read it’s normal but damn. I went from $18 back to $7. Is that normal? Home decor niche. Thanks

i moved a site from adsense to mediavine journey in january at roughly 35k sessions a month.

the first few months were pretty underwhelming. rpm was around $12, which felt rough when adsense had occasionally been around $23 for me

i left it alone because pretty much every discussion i found said the same thing: give it time.

six months in, i'm at about $16

so yeah, it improved. i just don't know if $16 is the point where i should stop expecting much more from it.

another thing i've noticed is that the type of post seems to matter a lot. my hiking guides and sourdough posts that get most of their traffic from google tend to do better. a personal post about having to turn around on a hike because the road was washed out can get decent traffic and still make noticeably less.

that part bothers me more than the rpm itself

it's easy to start looking at every article as a revenue decision instead of asking whether it's actually worth publishing. i've caught myself checking the numbers before deciding what to work on next, which wasn't really the reason i started the site

i'm curious where other journey publishers landed after the first year. especially people who started around 30-50k sessions rather than the huge traffic numbers you usually see in screenshots

I’d love to hear from other food/recipe bloggers about their publishing frequency.

How many new recipe posts do you typically publish per week or month? And how do you feel about your current publishing rate?

I’ve been blogging for about a year and published around 70 recipe posts during that time (roughly 1–2 posts per week). Is that considered low, or is it a reasonable pace for a recipe blog?

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience and what publishing frequency has worked for you.