Piroriro: Six Years of Whisky Blogging, ¥2,209,289 Total — a Full Disclosure of the Downhill from ¥73,421 to ¥7,975 a Month

Blog income reports only get written on the way up. Reports of a big month spread on social media, but almost no one publishes, with the same precision, the process of falling to one-ninth of peak over the following three years. saikootoko, who runs the whisky-focused blog “Piroriro” (he introduces himself as a man in his twenties who loves drink and cars), is one of the few exceptions. In August 2026 he published every yen of income since launch. Cumulative earnings over six years: ¥2,209,289. Annual income that peaked at ¥668,050 in 2021 had fallen to ¥192,801 by 2024.

What makes this piece valuable as a record is the simplicity of where the numbers come from. All income is from a single affiliate network, Moshimo Affiliate: the sum of 13,818 approved conversions, excluding ¥117,385 in rejected commissions. Rather than a “blog income” figure blending ad revenue, sponsored posts, and paid content, this is one ASP dashboard, laid out across six years.

The annual figures

• 2020 (from April onward): ¥29,270
• 2021: ¥668,050
• 2022: ¥529,657
• 2023: ¥453,682
• 2024: ¥192,801
• 2025: ¥210,450
• 2026 (through July): ¥125,379
• Cumulative: ¥2,209,289 (13,818 approved conversions)

Monthly, the best month was ¥73,421. The worst month of 2025 was ¥7,975, roughly one-ninth of peak. Pageviews topped out at 121,000 a month at one point, with a drop from 121,088 to 108,169 PV recorded in June 2021.

The blog opened in December 2018. Thirty operating reports have been published up to this one, and by their account, the first month to clear ¥3,000 came only after roughly 700 posts. Total articles stood at about 1,000 at the 36-month mark. The early period amounted to “write in bulk for almost nothing”; income arrived in 2021, and the decline began almost immediately after.

The shape of the annual numbers deserves a closer look. In 2022 and 2023 the declines were around 20% a year, but in 2024 income fell by more than half at a stroke, from ¥453,682 to ¥192,801. Yet 2025 ticked up to ¥210,450, and 2026 stands at ¥125,379 through July. A pace that, if it holds, matches 2025, seemingly finding a floor at just under a third of peak. Not a cliff-fall to zero, but stabilization at a lower waterline. One archetype of the affiliate-income decay curve is preserved here in real numbers. As an aside, the ¥117,385 in rejected commissions left out of the total equals about 5% of the approved amount, a useful side-figure on the reality of approval rates in product affiliate marketing.

What these numbers show

Start with the scale: even in whisky, a product niche with real prices and search demand, a personal affiliate operation’s annual income peaked at just under ¥670,000. This site’s blog and affiliate case files include upside outliers like Unico Blog, which reached over ¥1M a month with 300 posts, but that is the right-hand tail of the distribution. Piroriro’s numbers are far closer to the majority experience.

Next, the relationship between pageviews and income. A peak of 121,000 monthly PV and roughly 1,000 posts puts this blog comfortably in the upper tier of personal sites. Its best month: ¥73,421. Compare Kurashikilog, the gadget blog earning ¥150K a month on 120K monthly PV, and the same traffic produces less than half the income, genre payout rates and conversion design dramatically change what a single pageview is worth. Product affiliate commissions are small per unit: 13,818 approvals for ¥2.21M works out to roughly ¥160 per conversion. Volume without unit economics becomes the income ceiling itself.

Then there is the decline. The author writes that, honestly, he cannot pinpoint the cause. That stance raises the value of the record. Most income reports want to attribute a fall to a specific algorithm update or external factor, when in reality search rankings, commission terms, and buying behavior interact in ways even the operator cannot decompose. A record that says “I don’t know” where it doesn’t know leaves later readers room to interpret for themselves.

What to discount

What is public stops at annual totals and cross-sections like best and worst months. The author frames the six years as a three-act story, but only Act One (2018–2021) is free to read. The detailed monthly tables for the later acts sit behind a ¥7,980 paywall, and this article uses only the free portion. The fine shape of the decline, sudden drop or gradual slide, cannot be verified from outside.

Also, income confined to one affiliate network is elegant for measurement but means the business carries single-ASP, single-genre dependency as structural risk. Because these are approval-based figures, changes to advertiser commission rates or approval rates feed straight into income. Whether 2024’s halving (¥453,682 to ¥192,801) came from traffic loss or from changed terms cannot be separated using the free portion alone.

Conditions for repetition, and the limits

Piroriro’s record hands later readers not a formula for success but the shape of the median. Write in a genre you love for six years, roughly 1,000 posts, and the cumulative total is ¥2.21M, a level at which converting to an hourly wage is barely meaningful. That is less a verdict on the operator’s ability than a consequence of the structure of product affiliate marketing: low per-unit payouts multiplied by volatile search traffic. Like the measured six-year, two-month climb to ¥50K a month in the “Blog no Kamisama” genre-selection record, or the homemaker’s blog whose pageviews grew 19x while income grew only 5.8x, this is a data point showing that time invested and income are not proportional.

At the same time, the case shows the asset that only persistence creates. Six years and thirty operating reports of real numbers have themselves become rare content. The detailed version is, in fact, being sold. Even as whisky commissions thin out, “the record of running a whisky blog for six years” finds its own demand. Even the downhill converts into value as a record, ironic, but one of the few structural strengths of blogging as a medium that no algorithm can claw back.