What Blogging Income Streams Are Thriving in 2025?
One thing I've focused on in my nearly 17-year blogging career is tracking data. All data. Traffic, clicks, conversion rates, and income- I track it all.
Over the years, this has let me get a great snapshot of how my blogs are doing at any given moment, but also track larger trends on the order of years (now moving into decades).
Tracking every income stream category individually over this time has given me a sense of what is working in blogging (for me at least) as time goes on. Some income avenues, like display advertising, are on their way down, while others, like affiliate marketing and sponsored content, are on their way up.
So in this one, I wanted to share what I'm seeing and try to draw some conclusions on why some income streams are rising and others are falling.
Note: This article is skewed a bit to my own business, but the trends are likely applicable to many, as some of these are larger market shifts we're seeing across all sites. Likewise, 2025 figures in each chart are estimates for the entire year based on where we stand in July 2025.
How to Use ChatGPT as a Search Engine – Fight AI With AI
If you're a content creator like us, odds are good that you don't like the idea of AI and LLMs training off of your content.
Join the club.
One subset of all this AI nonsense that has enraged website operators is how search engines are pushing AI-generated overviews, which take publishers' intellectual property, reword it, and deliver it to queries at the top of SERPs- often cutting the original creator out of clicks, views, and ultimately, revenue.
Well, I'm here to tell you, there is a way you can fight back, and it involves using your preferred AI to bypass their AI.
Yes, dear reader, you can seemingly use AI to crawl search engines, organize results in clickable top 10 format (often even better than they do!), and not trigger a single ad or stupid AI Overview in the process.
Turnabout, as they say, is fair play.
A New Way to Monetize – Join Stay22's Retail Beta Program
This article is sponsored by Stay22. As always, all opinions are our own.
Stay22 has been a leading company in travel affiliate marketing for many years now, with its vast number of partnerships and unique technology to help website owners earn more money.
In 2025, Stay22 is expanding beyond the travel sphere and adding a new retail partner within the Nova product line. To start, they're looking for bloggers and website publishers with a strong US-based audience to help beta test.
So, what is Retail Beta and how can you get in on it? We have all the details in this one!
The Hidden Costs of Free Products as a Content Creator
“Hey Jeremy, we love your Insta. We're having an influencer night tomorrow and would love for you to come. We're giving attendees and a plus-one a free cocktail in exchange for a posted Reel and media we can use in our marketing. Will see you there?”
Absolutely not.
Oh, terrible brand comps. If I had $10 for every bad pitch I have received in my nearly 20 years of blogging, I would've retired a decade ago.
The truth of the matter is that a large arm of influencer marketing has become a race to see who can produce the most content in exchange for a nominal product and experience. While we certainly see instances where this model works, one point of discussion that is often overlooked is how that free product you're about to receive really isn't free. You have a great deal of costs that you'll incur no matter what that you may not be thinking about.
So let's talk about the hidden costs of taking a comp as a content creator!
5 Lessons Learned from Growing an AI Facebook Page
AI has become the bane of content creators around the world for many reasons. From LLMs ripping off our content to AI accounts, pages, and tools being propped up by networks left and right, there really is a lot of bad uses of AI in the world these days.
I generally do not use AI for any of my blogs, except for perhaps doing some mundane tasks like brainstorming or figuring out a calculation when doing analytics. But I also recognize that AI is seemingly not going anywhere, and so if networks are propping up accounts on the engagement-at-all-costs model, I thought I'd create a project that was purely dedicated to using AI tools from the start- AI images, AI copy, AI generated ads, and even an AI generated logo.
My goal? To see what all I could learn about launching a new brand in the age of AI, if being a solely AI page helps or hurts, and, long-term, if I could get the page to become part of any social bonus programs to earn revenue.
While I'm still waiting on the last bit, I've had some lessons learned in the first few months of launching the site.