Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on August 25, 2025.
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Welcome to the eighth entry into our niche product site case study series.
In this case study, we are tracking the performance of niche product sites I created between 2020 and 2022, sharing what is working, what is not, income and traffic changes, and lessons learned along the way.
The first site we will look at is The Grape Pursuit, a wine blog I started in early 2020. The second site is Hipster Homesteaders, a home & garden plus food & beverage blog we started in late 2021 (where we merged two lagging product sites, a coffee blog and sous vide blog, into a broader umbrella branding to allow for more content to be produced with other topics).
This update will cover everything that happened between January 2025 and August 2025. As mentioned in our last update, our wine blog saw a nice uptick with the homestead blog remaining flat. This trend held, and we have seen a solid increase on the wine side!
The Grape Pursuit
The Grape Pursuit is a wine blog chronicling our quest to try every grape variety in the world. The last seven months have been quite interesting as we've seen a monster spike in traffic and income, all while holding the course in producing new content.
We are now at 352 varieties, an increase of about +15 in the last seven months. We, naturally, have tried more wines from grapes we've had many times now, but we are still working towards finding new grapes every month- it is just getting harder and harder to find new varieties in our usual markets, unfortunately.
In the last update, we discussed how the blog's traffic got hammered in an algorithm update (dropping from 25,000 to 5,000 monthly page views) and then later recovered back to 15,000 page views. Now, we're back to where we started when the algorithms began acting up, and returned to 25,000 page views last month on 401 articles (+34 articles). Hooray!
As of publishing this article, we have 2,208 followers on Instagram (+12), 1,000 followers on Facebook (+0), and 368 newsletter subscribers (+22). I still haven't really done much in the form of overhauling my social media approach, so our growth has been somewhat flat in that regard. I know I can grow if I posted more Reels, but also, I really don't want to, and that's a problem. Still, it's a fun outlet to post wine reviews, and I'm fine holding until I can figure out how I want to manage those channels better.
So far, we've made approximately $13,538 on the site, an increase of $6,126 from our last update. This included roughly $808 in ad revenue from Mediavine Journey, $5,133 in travel affiliates, and about $185 in other affiliates (namely, associated wine products).
We quickly overshot our previous record of about $500/month from 2023 and blasted past it to average around $850/month now- primarily due to our travel guides being quite popular (particularly hotels via Stay22 and day tours on Viator). Based on this, we need to start traveling to more wine regions and hope to do so soon!
Although it took five years, we are on track to potentially hit $10,000 in gross income on this little passion project in 2025, which isn't too shabby for drinking wine a few nights a week, writing reviews, and visiting wineries when we travel. If we can hit a couple of wine regions and do another wine course before 2026, we are in a good position for another period of growth.
Our next target is getting into the normal Mediavine network!
Hipster Homesteaders
Our slower-moving product site, Hipster Homesteaders, is still about home and garden products. We merged sites in 2021 to form this broader concept and have had it as a passive setup to share advice on gardening, beekeeping, cooking, and more.
As of publishing this article, we have 903 followers on Facebook (-5) and 414 followers on Instagram (+4). On the social front, I admittedly do not really focus on this site much at all anymore. We'll post fun garden and kitchen photos occasionally, but we're really not being strategic in any sense of the word. Not professionally, and hardly even amateurly, if I'm being honest.
Over the past seven months, we published 4 more articles (90 in total). Although our traffic had collapsed in algorithm updates in 2023 and 2024, we are starting to see a bit of an uptick, going from 500 page views to 2,500 page views per month (or back to about half of our all-time high). Not great, not zero, and overall still not enough to really get us motivated to keep publishing here when we can focus our efforts elsewhere- for the time being, at least.
So far, we've made approximately $1,186 on the site, an increase of about $111 from our last update. We still periodically get some decent affiliate sales, particularly from our beehive articles, but it is one of those blogs where we really only post on social media or the blog when motivation strikes us. I generally will publish almost all of the new articles in a quarter in one single week, then promptly forget about the website for months on end.
Is this the best way to run a site? No. Is this going to grow the site? Absolutely not. At a certain point, we probably would be better off just selling for whatever nominal amount we can get, but I still enjoy it, so I can't think about parting with the idea just yet- but maybe soon.
Overall, this update shows a night and day difference in growth in two sites between one where we are very energized, focused on the content, and are topical experts via prestigous certifications (WSET Diploma in wine) and another where, while we are passionate in the topic itself, just don't have enough time or motivation to really push this one to where it needs to be.
Where do we go from here? We'll check back in January 2026 to share our next update!
For earlier entries into this series, check out case study update #1, update #2, update #3, update #4, update #5, update #6, update #7.
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