15.05 million PV, $85,000/month. How a laid-off housewife in her 40s became a top blogger in 1 year 10 months

Blog income disclosures are not rare, but few break down the earnings from seven ad networks to the yen and attach a bank passbook photo as proof. The July 2022 figures published by Nanao, who runs NANAO STYLE, total 12,554,345 yen. Only one year and ten months had passed since she started the blog.

The breakdown of 12,554,345 yen (July 2022)

The same month’s monthly PV was 15.05 million. Dividing it out gives roughly 0.83 yen per PV, and about 0.58 yen for AdSense alone. Since this scale was built almost entirely on click-based advertising, revenue behaves as close to a linear function of PV. The flip side is that if PV is halved, income is halved too.

22 months from 657 yen in the first month

When she started, Nanao was a housewife in her 40s who had been laid off from her job in 2020. She had worked office jobs taking home 160,000 yen, and by her own account lacked PC skills. The blog she first launched was a parenting blog, writing 27 posts a month for a monthly income of 657 yen. She writes that she went into “mini panics” every time something didn’t make sense or an error appeared, a period when solving a single problem took hours, sometimes days.

Two turning points where the tide changed

There are clearly two turning points in this case, and neither of them was “doing more work.”

The first was the shift from a parenting blog to a trending-topics blog. A parenting blog is a format where you write about what you want to write and what you’ve personally experienced — that was 27 posts for 657 yen. A trending-topics blog covers “people, words, and phenomena that are currently being talked about in society.” Nanao describes this as writing “not what I want to write, what I’m good at, or what I’ve experienced, but what many people want to know about.” From this transition onward, monthly income jumped an order of magnitude for three consecutive months: 40,000 yen in month 5, 110,000 yen in month 6, 210,000 yen in month 7. Around the same time, she received consulting from an instructor with a track record of 2.5 million yen in monthly income, learning how to write blog posts.

The second was switching to an aged domain at the end of May 2022. An aged domain is a domain that previously ran another site, and because it inherits evaluations such as backlinks, it tends to get indexed and rank highly from early on in operation. Nanao purchased one, and in July 2022, her second month using it, recorded a monthly income of 12,554,345 yen. She sets this against a comparison figure herself: 10 months on a new domain equaled 470,000 yen in monthly income. The core of this case is that the same writer, simply by switching domains, changed her speed of arrival by an order of magnitude.

Note that the month-by-month figures from August 2021 to April 2022 have not been disclosed, so of the jump from 470,000 yen to 12,554,345 yen, how much is attributable to the aged domain and how much to cumulative buildup cannot be separated from the information available. What can be confirmed is that she herself cites the aged domain as the biggest factor.

Why this combination worked

What worked was not a single tactic but the meshing of three elements: trending topics × click-based advertising × an aged domain.

The product lifespan of a trending-topics article is extremely short. If it doesn’t rank in search results within the few days a topic is at its peak, that article’s entire revenue opportunity disappears. A new domain, by its nature, takes time to be evaluated by search engines. In other words, for a trending-topics blog, how quickly a domain’s evaluation kicks in isn’t “something that pays off later”. It’s the precondition that determines whether revenue happens at all. An aged domain is a way to start already satisfying that precondition, which is exactly why its effect showed up more extremely here than it would in other genres.

The revenue model side meshes too. Affiliate marketing requires a deal to close, and the topic that’s trending often doesn’t match the product being sold. Click-based advertising turns into revenue regardless of an article’s content, as long as people show up. A trending-topics blog’s nature, “any topic will do”, pairs well with AdSense, which can monetize “any topic will do.”

And then there’s the team. This 12,554,345 yen is explicitly stated as “a total achieved by two people: myself and one writer.” Because trends erupt simultaneously across many topics at once, there’s a physical ceiling to how many one person can chase. Adding one more pair of hands meant doubling the number of articles that could be written once the domain’s evaluation had kicked in.

What this structure is carrying

Nanao herself writes about the instability of the income. Google AdSense can be “100,000 yen last month, 70,000 yen this month, even with the same page-view count, and sometimes it can be cut in half in a bad case.” So her countermeasure is bringing in multiple ad networks to average out the total. In fact, July 2022’s revenue was already spread across seven networks rather than concentrated in one. Even so, the top two networks account for 93.3%, so the diversification is still limited.

The bigger issue is that all of this revenue rides on a single entry point: search traffic. In a model earning 0.83 yen per PV, any fluctuation in search rankings translates directly into income. In the site-trading market, trend/breaking-news sites tend to be marked down for “depending on update frequency,” making it a genre that’s hard to value as an asset. The money is large while it’s coming in, but this is the kind of business where decay begins the moment you stop.

The aged domain itself carries risk too. A domain’s operating history is never fully visible to a buyer, and outcomes vary. The 12,554,345 yen result is what was observed when the one domain she bought happened to hit.

What can be taken away

What can be taken away is, first, the shift in thinking from “what I want to write” to “what people want to know.” The figure of 27 posts for 657 yen shows that it’s not the volume of writing but the choice of demand that determines revenue. Second, the choice to shortcut by learning directly from someone with a proven track record, Nanao chose her instructor by the standard of “I want to learn from the person earning the most.” And third, not letting revenue depend on a single source.

There are also things that can’t be taken away. The search environment of 2022, and the effectiveness aged domains had at that time, cannot be reproduced under today’s conditions. Guaranteeing reproducibility starting from “in her 40s, lacking PC skills” is not this case’s job. What’s disclosed is only the single fact that “this person, at this time, reached this point by this method.” And nine of the 22 months’ progression remains undisclosed.

Related reading

• Hitode’s blog operation — the model of an individual blog built up over the long term primarily on search traffic
• Revenue from 24 Kindle books — a different answer to side-income content production on a platform