Side-Business Blog "Tsuzuki Blog": From ¥42,000 to ¥1 Million a Month in One Year. Breaking Down the Published Monthly Data

Why this case is worth reading

Headlines shouting “¥1 million a month from blogging” are everywhere, but cases where the author publishes the numbers along the way (pageviews, revenue breakdowns, gaps against targets, the period of burnout) are rare. Tsuzuki published monthly reports on his own blog from the early days, so the slow start and the sharp late acceleration can be traced in data. Furthermore, in a Lolipop interview he even discusses the “afterwards”: his top articles falling in a Google update following his success. A valuable specimen of a side-business blog where both the climb and the descent are documented in primary sources.

The published monthly data

What the business is

While working as a web marketer (SEO) at an IT company, Tsuzuki launched “Tsuzuki Blog” in October 2018 and began operating it in earnest in January 2019 (with seven years of blogging experience before that). The main revenue source is affiliate marketing for video-on-demand (VOD) services (U-NEXT, TSUTAYA TV, FOD Premium) with AdSense as a supplement. The month-six breakdown confirms it: ¥52,017 in affiliate-network commissions versus ¥16,711 from AdSense, with performance-based revenue making up three quarters of the total.

The time invested is also concrete. The first 10 articles took about 8 hours each. The average after getting used to it was 5 hours. Total time to reach 100 articles comes to about 500 hours. Divide the ¥42,000 monthly revenue at the 100-article mark by 500 hours and the cumulative rate still falls short of ¥100 per hour, as he recalls of month three, “not even ¥10 an hour,” the first half was broken on a time-versus-revenue basis.

Inside the month-six report — the gap between targets and results

The month-six operating report even includes a comparison of targets and actuals.

Revenue overshot the target by nearly 40% while PV and unique users fell short. The month’s growth, in other words, is explained not by “more readers” but by closing conversions for U-NEXT, TSUTAYA TV, and FOD Premium. That is, by the conversion rate of a handful of earning articles. The next month’s planned moves were: trialing outsourced articles via Lancers (2–3 pieces), stepping up social media, and expanding into articles for blogging beginners, the seed of the later “lateral expansion into the side-business niche” is already written into the report at this point.

The turning point in writing — “conclusion first” from article 40 onward

What is interesting in his own retrospective is that he attributes the start of his search rankings not to “volume” but to a change in format. After writing the first 40 articles, he switched to a “conclusion first” structure that puts the answer at the top, whereupon more articles began reaching page one of search results. Structuring articles backward from the reader’s search intent is standard practice for an SEO professional, yet it took him 40 articles to apply it to his own blog. Conversely, the early slump had an explainable cause, “the writing format wasn’t optimized”, rather than being merely a period of endurance.

Three facts the numbers tell

Revenue is not proportional to article count. Two or three articles earn almost everything. The ¥42,000 at the 100-article mark was not spread across 100 articles but concentrated in a few VOD pieces. In the month-six breakdown, too, affiliate commissions of ¥52,000 are triple the ¥17,000 from AdSense. The gap between “earning articles” and “everything else” is brutally large.

The ramp-up is a battle with burnout. In month three, worn down by the reality of “below minimum wage on an hourly basis,” he paused for a month. That even a ¥1-million-a-month blogger’s history explicitly includes a period of giving up matters for calibrating the expectations of anyone starting out.

And yet he reached ¥1 million a month within a year. The late surge (¥69,000 in month six to ¥1 million at about one year) is the classic stock-type curve in which a cohort of articles begins ranking and monetizing simultaneously. The shape of this ramp matches the education app’s ¥120,000 → ¥1.47M → ¥3.91M: in a stock-type business, the first half’s numbers do not predict the second half.

The trial that followed — the risk side, told in the interview

In the interview, Tsuzuki also speaks concretely about the post-success decline.

• The cohort of long-tail VOD articles that ranked at the top in year one fell from #1 to #5 in the 2019 Google update
• “A long-tail article gets almost zero traffic unless it’s #1” — positions below first have almost no asset value
• What saved him was having expanded laterally into another field — side businesses and blog operation — while things were going well. “It’s precisely when things are working that you should widen your view sideways”
• He went independent not as soon as side income grew, but only after securing savings to survive two years on a tight budget even if income went to zero

His own practice and his advice to others also diverge in an interesting way on finishing articles. He himself is a polish-to-100% type, but what he recommends to others is publishing at 70–80% completeness to secure volume. In his framing, perfectionism is a personal weapon rather than a necessary condition.

Lessons and analysis

“Repurposing your professional skill” is the true identity of the shortest route. Tsuzuki’s day job is SEO. Success in blog side businesses tends to be attributed to “persistence” or “article count,” but the essence of this case is that he redirected a specialty honed in his day job into his own asset. The switch to conclusion-first and the monthly target-versus-actual review cycle are a marketer’s professional habits, pure and simple. The question when choosing a side business should be not “what’s profitable” but “in which domain can my professional skills be converted into a personal asset.”

Affiliate fragility boils down to “rankings.” Revenue concentrates in 2–3 articles, and those articles get zero traffic unless they rank #1, meaning the entire business is a bet on the rankings of a handful of keywords. That a telecom affiliate site sold for monthly profit × 20 months, “a mere two years’ worth”, is the price reflecting this structural fragility.

“Make your next move while things are good” is the shared conclusion of three top bloggers. In the same interview, Hitode and Kiguchi say the same thing: it is precisely when things are going well that you should launch the next initiative. Good times invite complacency, but the good times of a search-traffic business are not under your control. In a business whose success rides on external factors, the good times are exactly when to diversify.

How far is this replicable?

• What replicates easily: recording target-versus-actual gaps in monthly reports, identifying “the articles where revenue concentrates,” and shifting investment toward that lineage is an operation anyone can copy. The conclusion-first article structure, the publish-at-70–80% volume policy, and the two-years-of-savings independence criterion are all clear, and upfront costs stay within server and domain fees
• The limits: compared with 2019, VOD affiliate marketing faces intensified competition and a changed search environment (AI Overviews and the like), making the same playbook harder to run. The initial condition of “SEO is my day job” is not typical, and the life circumstances allowing a 500-hour upfront investment — which even he broke under once — are a prerequisite

Related cases

• The upper bound and the volatility of blog income, as seen in the top-blogger interview — the ¥10-million-a-month upper bound and the 80%-drop risk side
• Education app: ¥4.61 million a year in year three — the app version of the exponential ramp
• Telecom affiliate site sold for ¥950,000 — the going rate for an affiliate site’s “exit”