Over the past two months, I’ve reached out to 50 bloggers—people I’ve connected with in the industry over the years, from travel and food to personal finance, parenting, and technology. The question was simple: are you still making money from your blog in 2026? If so, how has the picture changed?
I was expecting a mixed bag. What I got was closer to the bill.
Of the 50 bloggers I spoke to, 31 told me their income had dropped significantly in the past 18 months. Nine said their blogs are now effectively dormant – still online but no longer generating enough revenue to justify active investment. Six completely focused on other sources of income. Only four described their blog income as stable or increasing.
These are not hobbies. These are the people who are making real money from their sites in 2023 – in many cases full time. It wasn’t a slow fade. For many of them, it was a cliffhanger.
That’s what they told me.
“My ad revenue dropped by 40% and never came back”
The most common story—I heard some version of it in more than 20 out of 50—was about a display ad. Bloggers making $3,000, $5,000, $8,000 a month from ad networks like Mediavine and Raptive have seen their income plummet as Google’s algorithm updates and AI Reviews reduce their organic search traffic.
One travel blogger I spoke to – five years on a site making about $6,000 a month from ads – told me that he’s seen his RPM (revenue per thousand page views) remain relatively stable, but his traffic has dropped so dramatically that his income has dropped below $2,500. “The math doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “Same content, same quality, same niche. The only thing that changed was Google.”
One food blogger described a similar trajectory. His site was getting 120,000 monthly sessions in early 2024. By mid-2025, it was less than 55,000. It lost almost all of its “what” and “how” queries in AI Visions. The posts that still ranked were those with a heavy personal story and original photography – but those posts made up 20% of his archive. The other 80% were quietly absorbed by Google summaries.
“The company’s income is the income that really hurts”
Several bloggers cited affiliate income as the most dramatically declining revenue stream – more than advertising, more than sponsorship. The reason is simple: AI Reviews and AI chatbots are increasingly responding to product comparison and “best of” queries, and recommendations are included in the summary. The click that used to send a reader to a blogger’s review page – and from there via an affiliate link – now often doesn’t happen at all.
This is followed by industry data. 2025 Blogging Income Surveywhich collected responses from 187 bloggers, found that while bloggers with diversified income streams generally earn more, those who rely primarily on affiliate income and display ads are the most vulnerable to traffic-based declines. The survey also found that bloggers who have been active for more than 10 years earn less on average than those in the 5-10 year bracket – which the survey author attributes in part to older sites carrying large amounts of outdated, unoptimized content, which lowers their overall performance in the current algorithm environment.
A personal finance blogger told me that his affiliate income dropped from about $4,000 to $1,200 a month – a 70% drop – even though his content was the same. “People don’t click for reviews anymore,” he said. “They get the answer from the AI digest and go straight to Amazon. They’re cutting me out.”
“I now make more from my email list than from Google”
All four bloggers who reported stable or increasing income shared one characteristic: they invested heavily in building direct audience relationships—primarily through email—before their traffic began to decline.
One of them, a productivity and personal development blogger, said he started considering his email list as his main asset in 2022, long before AI Insights was launched. When his Google traffic began to decline in late 2024, he had 28,000 email subscribers. He now earns more from a combination of paid newsletter subscriptions, small digital products and sponsored placements in his emails than he does from ads on his blog.
“My blog traffic is down maybe 35%,” he said. “But my income is actually up about 15% year-over-year. The difference is that the income now comes from people who choose to hear from me, not from people Google sends my way.”
Another blogger – in the parenting niche – described a similar loop. In 2024, after watching Mediavine’s revenue decline for six consecutive months, it created a paid membership community. Within a year, he was earning more from a portion of his followers than from his blog ads. “I have 1,200 paying members,” he said. “That’s worth over 200,000 monthly page views from strangers who bounce after 30 seconds.”
“I now subsidize my blog as a freelancer”
The most common response I hear from bloggers in the “declining but not dead” category is that they supplement their blogging income with client work—freelance writing, consulting, social media management, or VA services. Blogging has become a credibility engine rather than a revenue engine. It proved they could write, attracted incoming leads, and gave them something to point to when pitching. But he wasn’t paying his bills.
This change is reflected in the broader data. RankIQ’s survey of professional bloggers It found that those earning between $7,500 and $25,000 a month received 42% of their income from affiliates and 33% from advertising – but this level represents a small percentage of bloggers. For the vast majority, income is more modest. A 2023 RankIQ survey found that 28% of bloggers earn less than $10 per month, and only 17% earn more than $50,000 per year.
A blogger I spoke with put it bluntly: “My blog is now making about $800 a month. Two years ago it was making $3,500. I’m not going to shut it down because it’s still bringing in potential for my consulting business. But if someone were to ask me if blogging is a full-time income in 2026, I’d rather say that I haven’t used it for many. To be.”
“The people who are good are the ones who stopped depending on Google years ago”
One pattern was so consistent across all 50 conversations that it’s worth mentioning: the degree to which a blogger’s income declines correlates almost perfectly with how dependent they are on organic search traffic and display advertising.
Bloggers who branched out early into email, products, services, communities, or other platforms were crushed but working. Bloggers who built their entire businesses around the Google-to-network network were in real financial trouble.
This is not a new observation. Every piece of blogging advice published in the last five years has a “don’t put all your eggs in one basket” option. But there’s a difference between knowing this intellectually and restructuring your business around it – especially when the current model is working. No one diversifies when the money is flowing. After they stop, they branch off and by then the runway is short.
The bloggers who thrived in 2026 made their structural changes in 2021 and 2022 – before Helpful Content Updates, before AI Views, before traffic declines were seen. They were not pioneers. They were cautious. And that caution is now paying off in a way that no SEO strategy can replicate.
What did I take away from these conversations?
I want to be careful when drawing conclusions from 50 conversations. This is not a statistically rigorous survey. This is a filtered image from my own network, targeting bloggers who have been doing it for five or more years in the English-speaking markets. Bloggers’ experience in other languages, in other niches, or earlier in their careers may look different.
But with that caveat, here’s what I’m taking away.
The ad-supported, search-dependent blogging model that defined the industry for a decade is in structural decline. Not because blogging is dead—it’s not, and I’m sick of that frame—but because the economic infrastructure that makes it possible has changed. Google sends less traffic. AI Views interfere with requests used to drive clicks. Display ad revenue follows traffic volume downward. The model still works for the declining publishers at the top, but the middle tier—the bloggers making $3,000 to $10,000 a month who make up the backbone of the independent web—is being drained.
Bloggers who replace that income do so by selling their audience to their audience rather than selling it to advertisers. Products, services, memberships, paid content, consulting — revenue streams that depend more on the strength of reader connections than the volume of traffic. These streams are more difficult to build. They require a different skill set. But they are not subject to the whims of the algorithm.
And the bloggers who don’t replace that income – watch it dwindle without a clear path forward – are the ones that worry me the most. Not because they lack talent or drive, but because the industry has always sold them a model that is more fragile than it seems. “Create good content, get Google traffic, earn money with ads” worked for a long time. It doesn’t work anymore – not reliable, not for most people.
If that sounds brutal, that’s because it is. 50 bloggers told me this. And I don’t think they were exaggerating.
