¥9.27M a year on note: from ¥38,500 in January to ¥1M a month, backed by 830,000 social followers

Revenue reports on note usually end with “I made X yen.” The amount is all that’s left; how that amount was actually produced isn’t. The one-year performance report published by note creator “AI FREAK,” who covers AI tools, reads a little differently on that front. Alongside the headline, ¥9.27M in annual sales for 2025, the same report includes a starting point of ¥38,500 in January, a daily time investment of 2–3 hours, and a recurring-membership structure, all in the same piece.

This article cross-checks the disclosed figures against the membership pricing and participant counts visible on the note creator page, to verify where the ¥9.27M actually comes from.

The year’s revenue trajectory

The January and February figures are small as far as amounts appearing in “revenue report” posts go. ¥38,500 is a common enough entry point for a side-hustle note account. What makes this piece valuable is that the path from there to ¥9.27M in annual revenue over 12 months is laid out as actual figures from the time, not a success story reconstructed after the fact.

What’s actually being sold: the revenue sits on the recurring side

As far as can be confirmed on the note creator page, the vehicle for this revenue is a membership (monthly billing) rather than one-off paid articles.

A quick sanity check is possible here. If all 478 members were on Standard (¥980), that’s ¥468,440/month. If all were on Gold (¥1,980), that’s ¥946,440/month. The annual total of ¥9.27M divided by 12 gives a monthly average of ¥772,500, which falls squarely inside that range. The bulk of the ¥9.27M in annual revenue can be explained not by hits and misses on one-off sales, but by the running balance of the membership.

The significance of this structure isn’t small. A single paid article generates revenue only in the month it sells, and drops to zero if it doesn’t. A membership keeps generating the same amount the following month, as long as no one cancels. The gap between January’s ¥38,500 and December’s monthly revenue is more likely explained by the accumulated number of subscriptions than by any single article becoming a bigger hit.

Where did the trajectory turn?

The report clearly states the point where the operator recognized the shift was happening. Seeing the ¥38,500 and ¥65,680 figures for January and February, he judged that “¥1M a month is absolutely achievable”, and from that point locked in roughly 2–3 hours of writing nearly every day of the year.

The real substance of that turning point wasn’t “a viral article.” The decision itself (reading a still-unproven monthly figure of ¥65,000 as a sign of growth, and committing to that level of daily investment on a year-long timescale) is what became the turning point. He writes that he stopped thinking in terms of weekdays versus weekends, and was thinking about note even while traveling.

This should be read as a cost, not as an inspirational anecdote. 2–3 hours a day × 365 days comes to roughly 900 hours a year. Dividing ¥9.27M by that comes out to an hourly rate of roughly ¥10,000, but that’s the result value after a full year of running flat out. In January, it was work paying an hourly-equivalent of roughly ¥400. Whether or not you can tolerate that gap is the actual dividing line.

Breaking down the reasons for growth

Three factors stand out from the report.

First, no holding back on the free side. He writes that he committed to “generously publishing information on the free side that would normally be worth paying for,” without holding anything back. He never gated articles from the start, prioritizing building trust first. Under a membership model, this is the rational move. With one-off sales, gating a single article and cashing in immediately is faster, but a membership doesn’t get off the ground until readers make the judgment that “this person’s paid content is worth reading too.” Free articles function as a free sample with no advertising cost.

Second, no hype. The report includes a warning, in effect, that manipulative, hype-driven marketing to draw in customers leads to long-term churn. A membership converts dissatisfaction directly into lost revenue via cancellation. In a one-off sales model, the fight is “getting them to buy”. In a recurring model, the revenue itself is “keeping them satisfied after they’ve bought.” Banning hype tactics reads less like an ethical stance here and more like a structural requirement.

Third, he already had an audience. 81,000 YouTube subscribers. 580,000 on Instagram. 170,000 on TikTok. Over 800,000 combined. Rather than being built as a media property from zero, note was placed as a collection mechanism converting an existing audience into recurring paid membership. Most of the ¥9.27M is the cashing-out of an asset that had already been built outside of note.

What isn’t going well

The report also states that October through December was flat. A membership only keeps accumulating up to the point where new signups and cancellations balance out, after which it plateaus. If you’re running on the assumption of continuous growth, this kind of plateau reads as a “slowdown.”

The operator also has a section titled “three failures I learned in a year,” but its contents sit in the paid portion and can’t be confirmed in the free section. This piece therefore doesn’t get into the details of those failures.

One more point: the operator estimates that reaching a ¥30,000–100,000/month level is achievable with roughly 10 hours a week over 3–6 months, while reaching ¥1M/month requires, at minimum, an all-out daily commitment of 2–3 hours. That means the target amount and the required time investment aren’t linear. There’s a step change once you cross into a higher order of magnitude. That step change tends not to get spelled out explicitly in revenue-report articles.

What’s replicable, and what isn’t

Replicable is the design of putting billing on the recurring side, and the practice of not holding back on the free side. Simply switching from selling paid note articles one at a time to a monthly membership changes the nature of revenue from “start from zero every month” to “add to last month’s balance.” The decision not to hold back on free content also has no barrier beyond the cost itself.

Not replicable is the base of over 800,000 social followers. That can’t be built in a year, and the tailwind of AI tools being a spotlight topic in 2025 isn’t something you can choose either. It’s probably more accurate to read this case not as “anyone can aim for ¥9M a year on note,” but as “someone who already has an audience can turn note into a cashing-out mechanism and reach ¥9M a year.”

Debatable is the volume of investment, 2–3 hours a day, 365 days a year. Physically, anyone can copy that. Whether you can sustain it while looking at a ¥38,500 figure in January is a different question. This may be the hardest part of this case to replicate, harder, even, than the social media follower count.

Related reading

• Hitode’s blog operation — the long-term accumulation and revenue structure of an individual media outlet
• 24 Kindle books — another pattern of an individual stacking up content sales