manablog at ¥1,000,000–1,500,000/month, and two sites left idle 3–4 years before closing — the numbers Manabu published under his real name

Revenue disclosure down to the site name

Affiliate revenue disclosures tend to circulate as a bare figure detached from anything else. To actually verify a number, you need three things together: which site, how much traffic, and how much revenue. An article Manabu (Manabu Bannai) published in April 2018 lays out exactly those three, by site name. And in October 2020, he added a follow-up covering what happened to two of those sites afterward. Rarely does a single page let you trace both a personal blog’s rise and its eventual shutdown. The information density here is unusually high.

The breakdown of three disclosed sites

Combined, the three sites totaled ¥1.2–1.8 million/month on 750,000 monthly PV. The follow-up note reads: “e-Life and Sekai e Jump were completely neglected and traffic declined, so I’ve now closed them. Even neglected, they kept generating traffic and revenue for about 3–4 years.”

The revenue sources are AdSense and affiliate income, but the more notable figure here isn’t the total — it’s the concentration in a single article.

¥500,000/month from a single article

In the article, one piece comparing three programming bootcamps is disclosed to be generating “about ¥500,000 a month on its own.” Given manablog’s flagship revenue of ¥1,000,000–1,500,000/month, that means a third to half of the entire site’s revenue depends on a single article.

He describes the article’s structure: “It ranks around #3 for [programming bootcamp], and it’s just delivering the right information to people who searched that keyword.” His summary of the whole affiliate mechanism is similarly one-line: “just deliver the right information plus the right ad, for the right keyword.”

Of the 500,000 total page views, only a fraction (traffic on high-intent, purchase-oriented search terms) converts directly into revenue. Revenue is determined not by raw traffic volume, but by how many articles rank #1-ish on high-payout keywords. That’s the real substance behind the ¥1,000,000/month figure. The flip side: if that one article’s ranking drops, 30-50% of revenue disappears at once. Concentration is efficiency and fragility in the same package.

Two turning points

This case’s trajectory can be explained by two pivots, both traceable to his own writing.

The first: from writing what he wanted to writing what readers were asking. He started out in a “wrote whatever I felt like, because I liked blogging” state. As traffic grew, he began asking, “how do I grow this further?” and arrived at “ah, content that’s actually useful to readers is what matters.” From there he shifted toward SEO articles built around readers, and “sure enough, it worked. Traffic gradually started climbing.” Swapping his subject matter, from personal record-keeping to answering search demand, was the first pivot.

The second: dropping unnecessary pride. Writing for intermediate bloggers earning ¥50,000–100,000/month, he says: “drop your unnecessary pride.” Specifically, he calls out two misconceptions: feeling that ads look “uncool,” and prioritizing self-branding first. “You won’t get results without ads, and branding follows naturally once you get results.” He goes further: “steal whatever’s working”, recommending studying and copying what earlier successful sites did. It’s a rare instance of a creator explicitly stating that the barrier to monetization was ego rather than anything technical.

What didn’t work: “personal-diary articles”

The failures are documented in the same piece. After a stretch of grinding out SEO articles, he hit a wall: “I got tired of SEO articles”, “tired because I couldn’t write what I wanted.” So he shifted toward personal, diary-style posts for a while.

The result, in his own words, was a “crushing defeat.” “Traffic barely grew at all, and even when shared on social media, it just got ignored.” Even a writer already running a ¥1,000,000/month site with a recognized social media presence found that articles with no search demand generated no traffic. Extracting the lesson: “First, answer the reader’s question, self-expression comes second, situationally.” He frames Google as a question box: you only earn the right to share your own opinion after you’ve answered the question first.

This failure has real value in that it empirically refutes the assumption that once you have influence, anything you write will get read.

Neglected sites decayed in 3–4 years

The progression of the two closed sites also gives usable numbers. Two sites (each earning ¥100,000–150,000/month on 100,000–150,000 PV, substantial on their own) lost their traffic and revenue and were closed, 3–4 years after updates stopped.

That’s a real-world measurement of how fast SEO assets decay. Search traffic doesn’t vanish the moment you stop updating, but it doesn’t last forever either. A 3–4 year grace period is enough time to build a next revenue source, but too short to plan a life around benign neglect. The difference between manablog surviving and the two other sites dying is barely explainable by anything other than whether updates continued.

Living costs and risk posture as a precondition

His own cost of living is baked into the stability of this business too. He was based in Bangkok at the time, where “monthly living costs are about ¥50,000.” Asked what he’d do if an algorithm change wiped out his site, he answered: “I’m currently living on ¥50,000/month, so I figure I can start over infinitely.” His savings, he adds, are split between crypto and Wealthnavi.

¥1,000,000/month in revenue against ¥50,000/month in expenses functions as insurance against the uncontrollable risk of a Google algorithm change. Flip that around: run the same business against a high-cost-of-living environment, and that same risk becomes a survival risk directly. The reproducibility of this case is bounded not just by the revenue side, but by the expense side too.

The psychological notes are equally candid. He says he was happier during the ¥300,000/month period, and includes a section literally titled “Affiliate income exceeds ¥1,000,000/month → interest in money disappears.” That increasing income doesn’t scale proportionally with satisfaction is something he wrote himself, after achieving it.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

What transfers is his article-writing method and how he breaks goals into stages. His stated progression is clear: a complete beginner should aim for 30,000 PV/month first. A beginner should aim for ¥30,000/month in revenue (“that puts you in the top 5%”). Intermediate is ¥100,000/month (“top 2%”). Beyond that, it’s proportional to effort. Note the top-5%/2%/under-1% figures are his own estimation, not statistically derived, and should be discounted accordingly.

What’s hard to transfer is the timing. Ranking #3 on programming-bootcamp keywords and earning ¥500,000/month from one article is a product of the market environment circa 2018. That same genre has since become far harder, with corporate media entrants and algorithm changes. manablog’s success came from a real engineer, writing under his real name, entering a category with explosively growing demand, copying just the keyword targeting won’t reproduce that combination.

Another hard-to-transfer element: the nerve to tolerate revenue concentration. Depending on one article for 30-50% of revenue is efficient, but the outcome depends on whether you can keep building the next thing before that one article’s day comes. The two closed sites show exactly what happens when you don’t build the “next” one.

Related reading

• Three top bloggers on ¥10 million/month, and “80% of our articles dropped”
• 24 Kindle books — a case of building content assets somewhere other than search