I can’t believe it’s already time for another one of these reports. The past months have passed far too quickly, and here we are, already in July.
The last few months were a mixed bag. We had some amazing things happening, but we also saw a huge hit to our affiliate income. The rising price of oil and the following inflation made people think twice about booking a trip. We had far fewer affiliate bookings than we would have expected, based on the number of site visitors.
On the other hand, we managed to get into Medeiavine proper and have seen an increase in ad income since then.
We also had some great things happening privately. We went on an amazing trip to cross the US by train, going from coast to coast. And we both quit our jobs, which means we’ll go back to travelling full time in October this year.
So here comes our income report, with all the things we found that work for us as travel bloggers and the ones that don’t.
Why an income report?
When we started our travel blog, I was constantly googling how much other travel bloggers earned.
Back then, a lot of bloggers were publishing income reports. These days, I find it more difficult to get income data from bloggers. Maybe it’s the Google algorithm that doesn’t show me the link I’m looking for, or maybe there are fewer bloggers talking openly about how much they make.
Whatever the reason, we like transparency. That’s why we decided to publish those income reports every quarter (our latest was from Q1 2026).
It is also a great way for us to check how much money we’re earning. Our travel blog is a side hustle for us, it’s not our main income. In the day-to-day, we find it difficult to get an overview of how much we earn and how much we spend.
This report is a great reminder for us of how our income and our expenses are doing.
Our traffic in Q2 2026
It’s impossible to talk about income without talking about traffic.
Yes, there are bloggers who make a lot of money from very little traffic. And others make little money from a lot of traffic. But as a general rule of thumb, we find that our income correlates with our traffic.
The second quarter of 2026 meant a dip in traffic for us. This surprised us as we have a lot of content about Europe that usually gets more traffic at this time of the year.
Here is a breakdown by month:
| April 2026 | May 2026 | June 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active users | 23,773 | 30,946 | 24,200 |
| Pageviews | 36,088 | 50,648 | 38,799 |
Do you see how our traffic peaked in May and then declined again in June? We are pretty sure that was some Google update. It’s a shame because our blog was growing nicely and then it suddenly stopped. We got more traffic than in Q1, though, which is great.
They’re still pretty good numbers, and we’re happy with how many views and users we are getting. Most of our traffic goes to our food posts, but we also have a few other posts that are popular, like the best things to do in Peru or places to visit near Frankfurt.
Our travel blog income in Q2 2026
Affiliate income
Travelpayouts
Just like last quarter, the largest chunk of our affiliate income comes from Travelpayouts. We use Travelpayouts for almost everything and only use a handful of dedicated affiliate programs for things we can’t find on their platform (or, in the case of Get Your Guide, for historic reasons).
Our income was much lower than we had expected for that quarter, and we believe this was due to two reasons.
First, people are more hesitant to book. With the current uncertainties, we see that we get fewer bookings than we would expect.
Second, some partners on Travelpayouts confirm bookings months after they happened. Booking.com is especially guilty of this. We had some bookings made in March 2026. The guests stayed from 01 – 03 April. Now that we are writing this report, in July, Booking.com finally confirmed that the booking was not cancelled and we get our money.
This means that there’s a huge delay. I am curious how this will influence our revenue later in the year, when all of the summer bookings get confirmed.
In total, in Q2 2026, we got 237.62€ ($270.72) from Travelpayouts.
This income came from multiple sources. We got $150 from Travelpayouts for activating Targeted Offers (see our Travelpayouts review for more details on this function). The rest came from Viator, Klook, Trip.com, Yesim, Get Your Guide, and some more. Almost all were made through targeted offers.
Amazon
We have a blog post about the best travel lenses for Daniel’s Sony a7III. Most of our affiliate income from Amazon came from that post, though we occasionally also get sales through some other posts.
Here’s our biggest difficulty with Amazon: In order to display product images on our blog, we need to use the Amazon API. But we can only get access to the API if we had ten sales in the last 30 days. That means that the images on our blog often stop working, which makes it difficult to generate reliable income.
We are thinking of a workaround, but for now, let’s focus on our earnings.
In Q2 2026, we earned 90.89€ ($103.38).
Get Your Guide
Most of our Get Your Guide sales come through the direct affiliate program. We have been with Get Your Guide for a long time, and we still have all of our links set up to the direct program.
You might have noticed that we have some income from Get Your Guide on Travelpayouts, which comes through targeted offers. We do not have any influence on those, but we are happy to have them.
In Q2 2026, our income from Get Your Guide was 105.71€ ($120.23).
Advertisement income
In April, we switched from Journey by Mediavine to the regular Mediavine program, and we have seen an increase in advertising income since then. Since we switched mid-April, the income for that month is split between both programs.
For May and June, it is Mediavine only.
- April: $220.43 (193.78€)
- May: $392.26 (344.84€)
- June: $407.61 (358.33€)
In total, in Q2 2026, we earned $1,020.30 (896.95€).
Total travel blog income in Q2 2026
So how much did we earn in Q2 2026?
Here is a breakdown by source. The majority of our income came from advertising, though we also earned some affiliate income. Out of those, Travelpayouts paid far more than the other platforms.
Our travel blog expenses in Q2 2026
Running a travel blog costs money. Every month that this website is up, we have fixed expenses that we need to pay.
Most of those are billed yearly. We then calculate the monthly cost to account for how much we pay per quarter for our blog. Very rarely, we have one-time expenses, but those don’t happen very often.
Here is what we spent money on in Q2 2026.
Hosting & Domain: 46.10€ ($52.44)
We host our blog on SiteGround, and we’re very happy with them.
Our cost has gone up slightly since we bought a domain name and upgraded our hosting plan. It’s not very well reflected in Q2 yet, but we will see an increase in Q3.
Why did we buy a new domain name? Because we are going to start a niche blog very soon. Right now, we’re working on setting everything up, and hopefully, that blog will be up and running in the near future.
Keysearch: 25.35€ ($28.84)
Keysearch is our favourite keyword tool, so we keep our subscription there. It’s A LOT cheaper than most other available tools, and it works very well for us.
Tailwind: 42.60€ ($48.46)
Tailwind is a tool for scheduling pins on Pinterest.
We don’t actually use it much, but we have a legacy plan. Since we’re not sure if we can still get the same terms and conditions if we cancel our subscriptions and sign up again in the future, we keep it for now.
Grammarly: 29.88€ ($33.99)
Grammarly is the tool we use for spell-checking our articles. It also makes sure that our grammar is correct, and it sometimes gives advice on how to improve the flow of a sentence. We don’t always use all suggestions, but it’s a great tool to critically review our writing.
Capture One: 6.84€ ($7.78)
Can you believe that we only recently realised that we can write off our Capture One license as a travel expense? Daniel uses Capture One to edit all of the photos we use on Top Travel Sights, so we need it for our blog. But for reasons that are beyond us, we completely forgot to put it down as a business expense.
From now on, we are counting it. It’s only a few Euros a month, but it’s an expense that we have.
Banking fees: 4.43€ ($5.04)
Banking fees are a necessary evil when you run a travel blog. We had a few currency conversion fees from paying our subscriptions by card. Fortunately, they don’t add up to much.
Total expenses for Q2 2026: 155.20€ (176.54)
Our revenue in Q2 2026
If you take our income and deduct the expenses, you get our revenue.
In total, we got 1,331.17€ in income and had 155.20€ in expenses.
That means we earned 1,175.97€ ($1,337.69) in Q2 2026.
This is more than in Q1 2026. In fact, it’s almost twice as much. A lot of it comes down to us switching to Mediavine, but we can also see an uptick in bookings. Let’s see how this goes in the next quarter, as the summer months are usually strongest for us.
What’s coming next?
We have already hinted at it above when we mentioned our expenses. This summer, we want to start a niche blog. It’s going to be about a region in Germany to which we have extensively travelled and which we know very well.
Once we are ready, we will tell you more, so make sure to come back here in a few months.
We also have some exciting news on a personal level. As we mentioned in the introduction, we will go back to travelling full-time in October. We’ll start by travelling down Africa’s West Coast, and then we’ll see what happens afterward.
Hopefully, this also means that we have more time to focus on this blog and on our new niche blog. We haven’t left yet, and we’re already excited to start sharing travel tips and food recommendations with you!
We hope you found this income report useful. As we mentioned, we have written more income reports, so you can see what happened to our traffic and our income over time. Make sure to check back here if you want to see how things go in the future.
Until your next adventure!
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