Q1 2025 Income Report

See how my food blog income report performed in Q1 2025, including traffic, revenue, and insights into the current blogging and social media landscape (spoiler: it’s not great).

Hi! If you are not familiar with me, my name is Sophia and I run a food blog called Partylicious. I started my site in 2018 and I’m just now starting to do income reports because, let's be frank, it's a very uncertain time to be an online publisher or food blogger and I’m looking to share my experience.

Google traffic has been dropping significantly since the core update in October of 2023, and now Pinterest traffic has been on a downward spiral since January. I’m left feeling a little disoriented with regards to where my blog is at and where I’d like to take it. And hopefully these reports will help me work through everything.

Last year was looking good, I had my first 10k revenue month, and was consistently making 6-8k/months most of the year. So, the fact that the first three months of this year have been such a drastic drop has been pretty sad. Let's look at the numbers:

Q 1 traffic 2025

Q1 Traffic Breakdown

Q1 Income Total: $13,632.49

As you can see, the majority of my income is from Ad Revenue from my website, particularly from Pinterest. But, it’s down significantly from last year, sessions alone are down 33%:

Q1 2025 vs 2024

As you can see, my traffic is down 33% from this time last year. The only reason revenue is only down 15% is because my RPS are higher this year.

And, I've currently got almost 70k fewer sessions from Pinterest in Q1 of this year versus last year. I've always received the majority of my traffic from Pinterest, typically about 55% of overall traffic, which makes up a whopping 79% of my total revenue, mainly because the RPM for visiting through Pinterest is over double what it is for other traffic sources.

So the drop in traffic, and Pinterest traffic in particular, has been pretty detrimental to my revenue. I have no idea if this traffic will recover, or if this is the new normal for Pinterest.

Q1 Total Expenses 4,281.31

Here are some of my expenses and what I'm currently using on a subscription basis (please note some of these are affiliate links).

The drop in traffic, particularly in Pinterest, has shown me just how much I’ve been relying on one platform for my blog income and how dangerous that is.

Not only that but I haven’t been creating as much content for my site as I have in pervious years. For the last year and half I've been focusing a lot on short form video. It's been really fun, but takes a ton of time and has not driven any real revenue. And, I still only have 11k followers on Instagram.

Focusing on video has helped me grow quickly grow my Facebook page, and I've seen a slight increase in traffic from Facebook since I started posting consistently and I've joined the monetization program. I didn't make much this quarter so it is yet to be seen if that will be worth the time and effort.

As of now, I’m going to focus on trying to diversify my traffic sources and see how this all plays out. I’d love to hear from other bloggers on how they are faring in this environment and what everyone is doing! Let me know if you have any questions I can answer in the comments 🫶

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