Two bloggers cross the ten-year mark this year. One has been diversifying into digital products and email-driven sales since year four. The other has been running the same ad network since 2015 and hasn’t touched the theme, the internal links, or half the old posts since. Both will show up in next year’s income survey as “10+ years” bloggers, and the data increasingly says they belong to two different businesses wearing the same label.
What the survey actually measured
Eb Gargano’s Blogging Income Survey 2025 collected anonymous Typeform responses from 187 bloggers between January 24 and April 21, 2025, drawn mostly from her own email list, course students and Facebook group, skewed toward English-speaking countries and bloggers already focused on monetizing. Alongside total monthly earnings, Gargano’s survey tracks something most income reports skip: RPM, or revenue per thousand pageviews, broken out by how long each respondent had been blogging. RPM strips out the effect of traffic size and asks a narrower question: how much is each visitor worth, on average, once a blogger settles into their monetization mix.
The rate falls exactly where the money should be at its best
Gargano’s cohort breakdown moves in one direction for most of a blog’s life, then reverses. Bloggers under a year in averaged an RPM of $10.99. That climbed to $21.61 for the 1-to-3-year group, $24.97 for 3-to-5 years, and $52.59 for 5-to-10 years — a steady, unsurprising climb as bloggers learn what their audience will pay for. Then, at the 10-year mark, it drops to $43.41. Bloggers who have survived the longest, built the biggest archives and presumably learned the most about their own audience are earning less per thousand pageviews than bloggers who’ve been at it for as little as five years.
Total monthly income follows a different, uninterrupted curve, which is part of why the RPM dip is easy to miss unless a survey specifically isolates it. Average earnings run $2.42 a month under a year in, $205.44 by year one to three, $1,044.91 by year three to five, $2,621.24 by year five to ten, and $5,624.91 past the decade mark. Every stage looks like unambiguous progress if income is the only number on the page. The rate is the number that turns over.
The traffic still wins the month
That drop in rate doesn’t show up as a drop in income, because the 10-year-plus group isn’t playing the same traffic game. Gargano’s data puts average monthly pageviews at 49,841 for the 5-to-10-year cohort and 129,562 for bloggers past year ten — roughly 2.6 times more. Multiply pageviews by RPM and the math resolves the apparent contradiction: $5,624.91 a month for the veterans against $2,621.24 for the 5-to-10-year group, more than double. A decade of accumulated posts, backlinks and search rankings buys enough extra traffic to outrun a worse rate per visitor. It doesn’t buy back the rate itself.
What’s actually dragging the rate down
Gargano’s own read points at monetization mix, not fatigue or algorithm penalties. “Most of the bloggers in this category get the majority of their income from ads,” she writes of the 10-plus-year group. “Many get almost 100% of their income from ads and, according to the data, ads deliver the lowest RPMs of all the different blog monetization methods.” She adds a second, compounding factor: bloggers who’ve been running a site for over a decade are “likely to have a lot of poor quality, out of date and/or unoptimized content” sitting alongside their newer posts, diluting the average value of every pageview the archive generates.
The size of the gap ads are leaving on the table
The survey’s own numbers make the ads-heavy strategy look worse the closer you look. Display ads across Gargano’s full sample averaged an RPM of $33.80. Digital products averaged $283.64 — not a marginal difference but roughly eight times the return per thousand pageviews. A blogger converting even a modest share of ad-supported traffic into email subscribers and a paid product isn’t chasing a nice-to-have upgrade. The survey doesn’t isolate how much of the gap between the 5-to-10-year and 10-plus-year cohorts traces to monetization mix specifically, but it’s Gargano’s own leading explanation for the drop.
What the sample can and can’t tell a reader
Gargano is upfront about who answered the survey: respondents skew toward her own email list, course students and Facebook group, which means the sample leans toward bloggers already treating their site as a business rather than a hobby. A 10-plus-year blogger who never tried to monetize seriously in the first place wouldn’t necessarily show up here at all, and the RPM figures likely understate how much worse the gap looks across the full population of aging, half-abandoned blogs that never had an income-focused audience reading along. If anything, that bias should make the 10-year RPM drop harder to dismiss, not easier — it’s showing up inside a sample stacked with people who are actively trying to monetize well.
This doesn’t mean blogging gets worse with time. The traffic compounds, the archive compounds, and by year ten a blog with any monetization at all is likely earning more in absolute terms than it did at year five. What compounds alongside it, for a meaningful share of long-running blogs, is a growing pile of old content still running the least efficient way to make money on it. The bloggers who avoid the RPM drop are the ones who keep changing what they sell as the decade goes on, rather than letting an aging monetization mix ride on accumulated traffic alone.
