Gadgemaga: 594,562 Pageviews, ¥3,784,734 in a Month — The Ledger a Former Civil Servant Published Down to the Last Yen

Personal blog income reports usually get rounded to the nearest ten thousand yen. Thomas, who runs Gadgemaga, published his to the last yen. November 2020: 594,562 pageviews, ¥3,784,734 in revenue. October 2020: 660,900 pageviews, ¥3,865,606. The monthly reports run unbroken from 2019 onward, digits intact.

Gadgemaga covers smartphone and gadget reviews plus practical “life improvement” explainers. The domain, 2week.net, is a play on “too weak”, the operator says the misspelling simply stuck. Before this, he worked at a central government ministry in Tokyo as a general-track national civil servant. According to a free interview published by Wanibooks’ News Crunch, he was logging 180 hours of overtime a month, working until 2 or 3 a.m., and earning roughly ¥400,000 a month including that overtime.

Five years later, the same person booked ¥3.78M in a single month. But the interesting part of this case is not the peak. It’s the sequence of numbers the monthly reports preserved: which months rose, which fell, which investments failed to pay back, and what actually built the peak.

Twelve months on the books

Reordering the table from his December 2020 report into chronological order gives the following. “Posts/videos” is what he produced that month.

Over those twelve months pageviews rose 1.6x while revenue rose 3.2x. The fact that traffic and money did not move at the same rate is the entry point to this case.

Go back another year and the gap widens. January 2019: 104,374 pageviews, ¥242,873. February 2019: 101,533 pageviews, ¥205,641. Across all of 2019 the blog drew 2,601,738 pageviews on 232 posts and 116 videos. The 2018 total had been 846,227, traffic more than tripled in a year.

YouTube, not pageviews, drove the revenue

The operator repeatedly credits YouTube with pulling the blog up, and the monthly reports back him up.

When he first cleared ¥1M in a month (¥1,194,969, December 2019), he wrote that roughly 30% of it came from YouTube. By the report covering the ¥3.86M month of October 2020, the framing had flipped: two-thirds of revenue was YouTube. At that point the channel had 170,000 subscribers and his Twitter account 20,000 followers. A year earlier, in November 2019, the channel had 20,000 subscribers, about 600,000 total views, and paid out a little over ¥300,000. In twelve months the center of gravity moved from search traffic to video advertising.

The blog benefited too. He describes YouTube as “an extremely high-quality external link,” arguing that video recognition fed blog pageviews. The traffic curve supports it: pageviews sat near 100,000 through early 2019 and turned upward once video production ramped in the second half of that year.

This is where the case diverges from sites that hit the ad-rate ceiling. A media blog that pulled 3.5 million monthly pageviews and still earned only ¥200,000–300,000 a month shows what happens when you are beaten on rate per view. Gadgemaga’s move was less about adding pageviews than about moving the same subject matter onto higher-rate surfaces, video advertising and higher-ticket affiliate goods.

One operational detail matters when reading these figures: payouts arrive roughly a month late, so each report’s revenue reflects the previous month’s work. In the November 2020 report he already knew the next month would drop about ¥1M because he had slacked off in November.

The failed investments come with price tags

What makes this case unusually readable is that he also published what the failures cost.

In May 2019, one month after going independent, he set off to ride a motorcycle around Japan, riding the wave of bloggers moving into YouTube at the time. Including ad spend it cost about ¥1.3M and produced essentially no revenue. His own verdict is that it failed. Over June–August 2019 monthly pageviews fell from 230,000 to 190,000 to 180,000, and in July he published zero blog posts.

The remake of those Japan-tour videos, started in February 2022, ended the same way. He spent about ¥1.3M on ad spend and English subtitles and states outright that there is no prospect of recovering it. Pageviews slid from 480,000 in February 2022 to 250,000 by May, at which point he suspended activity.

Both times, the ¥1.3M went into a project designed to escape making new material. Reworking back-catalogue content is rational when it is cheap. Stacking outsourcing and ad spend on top of it breaks the math.

The 41-month peak, and after

His own site history lays out the shape of the business.

• Oct 2015 — launched on FC2 Blog
• Jul 2017 — moved to WordPress at 2,000 monthly pageviews
• Jul 2018 — reached 100,000 monthly pageviews
• Jan 2019 — began daily posting (180 consecutive days, through June)
• Apr 2019 — quit his job at roughly ¥200,000 monthly income
• Dec 2019 — crossed ¥1M in a month
• Feb 2021 — 630,000 pageviews and ¥5.08M, his best month ever
• Apr 2023 — he marks the end of the “COVID bonus”
• Mar 2025 — 773 posts and 514 videos public (plus 320 posts and 65 videos unpublished)

The decisive number sits inside that history. For the 41 months from December 2019 through April 2023, he reports an average monthly income of ¥2.05M and a cumulative total of ¥84.2M. The ¥3.78M and ¥5.08M months were summits. Normal operation was around ¥2M. Reading only the peak overstates this business by nearly a factor of two.

After April 2023 he treats the COVID bonus as over. Pageviews fell to 190,000 in August 2023 and 160,000 that November, roughly a quarter of the peak in about ten months. The inventory of posts does not disappear, but the traffic does, which is exactly how ad-dependent media decay. Set against the top Japanese bloggers who described peaks above ¥10M a month and annual incomes swinging between ¥30M and ¥100M with each algorithm update, the volatility looks structural rather than personal.

What transfers, and what does not

Three things look reproducible. First, running the same subject through both text and video. The “posts/videos” column shows 11–14 articles and 6–34 videos shipped in the same month, over and over: research and testing costs are paid once and distributed across two surfaces, with video creating awareness and the blog catching the search demand. Compare that with a gadget YouTube channel that reached 10,000 subscribers and ¥165,945 a month on one or two uploads a month and the difference in throughput is an order of magnitude.

Second, doing volume first. Of the 180 consecutive posting days starting January 2019 he writes that quality matters more than quantity, but understanding quality requires quantity. Through March 2019 pageviews stayed at 160,000. That effort did not convert into revenue directly.

Third, the timing of equipment spend. He bought a used full-frame camera for ¥150,000 in June 2018, when the blog was at 80,000 monthly pageviews. He describes it as a frightening amount of money at the time, and he paid it before the traffic justified it.

The non-transferable conditions weigh more, though. This peak sits inside a window where the smartphone market was expanding, YouTube ad rates were climbing, and the pandemic pushed viewing time up. He says plainly that without COVID he would not be where he is, and he later draws the end-of-bonus line himself. Running the same playbook today does not open the same window.

Then there is the workload. The November report is headlined with the thought that he may be at his limit. He describes writing a 3,000–5,000 character article as feeling like producing a paper each time, steadily eating his mental bandwidth. Cumulatively he has produced roughly 1,100 articles and 600 videos. The ¥3.78M month is the return on that volume, not the output of a machine running by itself.

He has since disclosed that his total assets passed ¥100M in July 2024. As a milestone that reads cleanly, but the instructive part of this business is upstream: the 41 months averaging ¥2.05M, and the two projects that each burned ¥1.3M. Placed beside a blogger who reached 15.05 million monthly pageviews and ¥12,554,345 in a month, blog revenue keeps the same shape, a high ceiling, and a hard floor to hold.