Gadgeneko: Six Years, 356 Posts, 70K Monthly Pageviews and ¥60,000 a Month — Revenue Doubled After Surviving a Core Update and a Domain Change

In February 2026, Neko-oishii, the operator of the Japanese gadget review blog Gadgeneko, published a sixth-year check-in. Total posts: 356. Monthly pageviews: about 70,000. Revenue: roughly ¥60,000 a month on average, with a high of about ¥130,000. Revenue had roughly doubled year over year. This is where a side-project blog stands after six years of weekly updates, written by a working parent.

The value of this case lies less in the size of the numbers than in the continuity of the record. Gadgeneko publishes a “year N report” every year, and reading the sixth-year report against the fifth lets you trace six years of a personal blog (a core-update hit, the gamble of a domain change, and recovery through Google Discover and Google News) in actual pageview and revenue figures.

Reading the annual reports side by side

• Around year 3: stuck at 20,000 monthly pageviews (recalled in the year-5 report)
• October 2023: hit by a core update
• August 2024: changes the domain as a countermeasure (from “ガジェねこ” to “GADGENEKO”); recovers to 50,000 monthly pageviews afterward
• Year 5 (February 2025): reaches 300 posts. Around 40,000 monthly pageviews, roughly ¥30,000/month (high about ¥60,000). Net +47 posts in a year (62 were actually written; those unlikely to draw traffic were deleted)
• Year 6 (February 2026): 356 posts (+56 in a year, none deleted). About 70,000 monthly pageviews, roughly ¥60,000/month (high about ¥130,000), revenue about double year over year

There was also a period when the blog reached 100,000 monthly pageviews. The year-5 report contains the line “I miss the days when it was doing 100,000 a month.” Taken together, these six years are not a straight upward line but a trajectory of peak, trough, and recovery.

What stands out in this timeline is the decision to change domains in August 2024. For a blog with operating history, a domain change risks giving up accumulated evaluation in one move, and is normally treated as a last resort. Gadgeneko did it as a response to the damage from the October 2023 core update, and the result was a recovery to 50,000 monthly pageviews and, the following year, 70,000. Of course, whether the domain change caused the recovery or simply coincided with a reassessment on the algorithm’s side cannot be separated out. Still, few personal blogs preserve the whole sequence (hit, response, recovery) in real numbers across annual reports, which makes this a rare reference point for operators in the same situation.

A shift in editorial policy is legible too. In year 5, 62 posts were written and 15 deleted for a net gain of 47. In year 6, 56 were added and none deleted. The move from a screening operation that cuts posts unlikely to earn traffic to one that keeps what gets written reads as circumstantial evidence that the hit rate on posts has improved.

The mechanics of recovery — the economics of the “Google cannon”

In the sixth-year report, Neko-oishii attributes the growth in pageviews and revenue frankly to “Google’s blessing.” Discover placements, Google News placements, and top search rankings all increased, and reviews of the Xiaomi Pad 7, AKASO 360, SOUNDPEATS H3, and Kensington Slimblade Pro took what Japanese bloggers call a “Google cannon” hit and drew high pageviews.

Discover traffic behaves nothing like search traffic. Search is a stock channel where a post that holds a ranking delivers readers steadily every day. Discover is a flow channel where a featured post explodes for a few days, and the logic behind placement is not published. Gadget reviews carry the news value of new product launches, which makes the genre a good fit for Discover. Sustaining a weekly publishing rhythm for six years functions, on this reading, as a device for maximizing the number of draws in that lottery.

The flip side is that doubling revenue year over year is not the outcome of a repeatable tactic. It can roll back at any time depending on how the platform allocates attention. The same blog did experience a trough after the October 2023 core update and was pushed as far as a domain change the following year. The growth and the trough come out of the same tap.

The tension in reviewing supplied products

Another thing this record preserves is that the tension between manufacturer-supplied products and honest reviews is written down with names attached. According to the year-5 report, the blog had been receiving several review units from audio maker TRN, but after the ST7 earphones were assessed as “kind of ordinary,” the supply “stopped dead.” Even so, the operator did not change the policy of writing honestly regardless of whether a product was supplied, and continues to state the goal of “driving dubious gadgets out of the market.”

Paying the cost of losing review units in order to write honestly means, in the short run, carrying more equipment expenses. But a review blog’s asset is reader trust itself, so as a long-term survival strategy it is coherent. In gadget coverage, conflicts of interest between supplied products and revenue are permanently suspected, which makes a record that documents even how the supply stopped readable as source material on the genre’s internal workings. The distance kept from review subjects is consistent as well: on the ANBERNIC RG35XX H emulation handheld, the report notes that “even a year later, I can’t shake my doubts about whether this product is legally sound”, reservations about a covered product left in the record.

Points to discount

Gadgeneko’s reports contain no breakdown of revenue sources. Whether the roughly ¥60,000 a month comes from ads or from product links, and in what proportion, is not written, and this piece does not speculate. As of year 5, the operator self-deprecatingly described traffic as leaning on one particular brand (MOONDROP), so the composition of pageviews can hardly be called diversified. And ¥60,000 a month is a level that refuses hourly-rate arithmetic against an input of six years and 356 posts. The operator himself sets the condition for continuing as “not going into the red, and not getting bored,” which is closer to the accounting of a sustainable hobby than the P&L of a business.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

In the same gadget genre, Kurashiki Log, which earns ¥150,000 a month from 116 free posts and 120,000 monthly pageviews, shows a design with a much higher revenue per pageview. How much genre selection dictates revenue efficiency can also be checked numerically in the measured record of “Blog no Kamisama,” which took six years and two months to reach ¥50,000 a month. Set alongside Tsuzuki Blog, which climbed from ¥42,000 to ¥1M a month in a single year, Gadgeneko is the opposite type, the one that survives slowly, and its documentary value lies precisely in having recorded the crisis response, from core-update damage through domain change to recovery, under a real name and with real numbers.

The conditions for repetition are simple but heavy: one post a week for six years, without quitting through the troughs caused by external shocks. What made that possible was not revenue but not getting bored, and that single point is what six years of check-ins consistently show.