A stay-at-home mom's blog, year two: 203,000 yen annual revenue. PV grew 19x, revenue grew only 5.8x

Blog revenue disclosures tend to skew toward the top of the range, “1 million yen a month,” “100 million yen a year.” But the level most people actually reach sits several digits below that. The two years of records published by the operator of Delako Blog, who goes by Delako, show that ordinary-sized band in numbers, one of the few primary sources to do so. Annual revenue was 34,700 yen in year one and 203,000 yen in year two. The amounts are small, but post count, PV, and revenue each grew at a different multiple, giving enough resolution to read how an individual blog’s growth is structured.

Laying out two years of numbers

Delako divides the operating period by the site’s launch date, comparing year one (March 20, 2021 – March 19, 2022) and year two (March 20, 2022 – March 19, 2023), each spanning the same 365 days.

Partway through year two, in January 2023, she hit 10,000 PV in a single month. She says 88% of traffic came from organic search, with the rest from social media.

What stands out here is that the three multiples don’t line up: posts 2x, PV 19x, revenue 5.8x. As discussed below, PV growth far outpacing post growth is a result of improved search rankings. Revenue growth, on the other hand, hasn’t caught up with PV growth.

The gap becomes even clearer when converted to revenue per PV. Year one: 34,700 yen ÷ 4,050 PV ≈ 8.6 yen. Year two: 203,000 yen ÷ 76,658 PV ≈ 2.6 yen. Converted to revenue per 1,000 PV (RPM), it fell from 8,568 yen to 2,648 yen, down to less than a third.

What the blog is about

Delako is a stay-at-home mother of two (an 8-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl at the time of writing), and the blog’s concept is “living relaxed, rich, and cheerful.” She writes about earning money from home while raising kids solo, covering topics like childcare, housework, time-saving tips, deals, and side income (including Rakuten ROOM). The platform is WordPress.

Revenue isn’t from a single source. She uses Google AdSense, Rakuten Affiliate, Amazon Associates, A8.net, Moshimo Affiliate, ValueCommerce, afb, and also closed-application ASPs including Rentracks, Felmat, and CircuitX. The fact that a personal blog only a bit over a year old is already using multiple invitation-only closed ASPs is important information when thinking about the quality of year two’s revenue.

What changed in year two was the time of day she worked

Year one had 26 posts. Year two had 53. What produced that gap is something Delako spells out clearly herself: she moved her working hours from night to morning. In year two she started waking at 5–6 a.m., dedicating two hours to work, and also working in whenever there was a spare moment during the day.

There’s also a shift in mindset she cites. “Simply thinking of blogging as work.” Her reasoning: “with an attitude of ‘it’d be nice to earn a little pocket money,’ days when I don’t do anything at all show up because of kids’ events or being tired.” Her policy is: “always work while the kids are asleep.”

The way this shift takes effect is more structural than a general lesson about time management. Disposable time while raising children doesn’t exist as “whatever’s left over in a day.” If you try to work at night, you’re exposed daily to two disturbances: whether you succeed in putting the kids to bed, and your own fatigue. 5 a.m. is a time slot where neither of those two variables intervenes. By turning her working hours from a leftover into something claimed first, a pace of a bit over two posts a month became reproducible. As for why post count didn’t grow in year one, she explains: “there was a lot of unfamiliar work (how to write blog posts, structure, registering with ASPs, hunting for ads) so I spent more time researching than actually writing.” In year two, whatever the learning cost dropped went straight into writing.

As supporting factors, she also cites investments in appliances like a “twin chef” (hands-off cooker) and a large dishwasher, adopting Canva Pro (to speed up image creation), and centralizing post ideas and tasks in Google Sheets. All of these reduce not the per-task cost of work, but the friction of getting started.

Why revenue stalled at 5.8x even though PV grew 19x

For why PV growth (19x) far exceeded post growth (2x), Delako cites three factors: more posts, more posts ranking highly in search, and reviewing internal links to reduce bounce rate. By the end of year two, cumulative post count stood at 79. Dividing the period total of 76,658 PV by that gives roughly 970 PV per post, but it’s natural to assume that a small number of posts that ranked well are carrying the bulk of that PV. An individual blog’s PV isn’t proportional to post count. It’s proportional to the number of posts that achieved ranking.

Meanwhile, she also explains herself why revenue didn’t keep pace with PV. She states plainly about year one’s revenue: “This happened to be thanks to high-value ASP payouts of 3,000–10,000 yen per conversion, so it wasn’t stable income.”

Cross-referencing this with the RPM figures above reveals the real nature of year one’s 8,568 yen per 1,000 PV. Against a small base of 4,050 PV, if even a handful of several-thousand-yen conversions occur, RPM can easily spike. Year one’s RPM, then, was no real baseline but an outlier driven by a small number of high-value conversions. Reading year two’s RPM of 2,648 yen as a value that reverted toward the mean, once PV grew 19x and the base got larger, fits the picture more coherently.

Put differently, what happened over these two years wasn’t so much “revenue growth stalling” as “numbers that depended on chance being replaced by numbers backed by volume.” The quality of the revenue changed by more than the growth in amount (5.8x) suggests.

The instability she admits herself

The weak point of this case is disclosed by the operator herself, upfront. A substantial share of revenue depends on high-value conversions occurring, and 88% of traffic (that is, being at the mercy of Google’s algorithm) comes from organic search.

On social media too, she added Pinterest and lemon8 starting around June 2022, moving away from a Twitter-centric setup. Her reasoning: “Twitter keeps changing its rules too, and I feel like if I got suspended, that’d be it.” Diversifying away from a single platform while revenue is still small is commendable, but flip it around and the bulk of traffic is still concentrated on search.

One more suggestive detail: her stated goal for year three is “earning about what a part-time job would pay.” 203,000 yen a year works out to about 16,900 yen a month on average, which falls short of a typical part-time wage. The fact that this is the amount even after doubling post count and growing PV 19x over two years, as-is, shows just how slow blog revenue is to get off the ground.

How much of this can be copied

What’s reproducible is the part about designing your workflow. Fixing your working hours to a time with fewer disturbances, keeping up a pace of roughly 50 posts a year, reviewing internal links to build circulation, and centralizing ideas and tasks in a spreadsheet so you can act during any spare moment. None of this requires capital or an existing following.

What’s harder to reproduce is the revenue side. Year two’s 203,000 yen was built with a mix that includes deals from closed ASPs like Rentracks, Felmat, and CircuitX. These are essentially invitation-only and won’t open an account without some track record. Her own account of “high-value payouts of 3,000–10,000 yen” happening by chance also isn’t something you can deliberately reproduce. On top of that, the household condition of her children’s sleep stabilizing enough to secure two morning hours is a variable that willpower alone can’t move.

The most practically useful figure to take from this case is probably RPM, not the revenue amount itself. RPM is unreliable while the base is small. Only once PV reaches into the tens of thousands does a blog’s true unit value become visible. For Delako Blog, that value came out to roughly 2,600 yen per 1,000 PV.

Related reading

• Hitode’s blog operation — an individual blog that reached a different order of magnitude entirely; comparing the timelines of accumulation surfaces the gap.
• Kindle publishing, 24 books — a content-asset model that depends not on search rank but on exposure within a store; a different shape of platform dependence.