Is blogging dead or just getting started in 2025?

I started blogging in January 2024. And after 1.5 years I have a travel blog that’s part of the Mediavine ad network, has 80K visitors per month, and makes me $3,500 per month. In this post I will share my answer to the “is blogging dead in 2025?” question that I hear so often so you can decide where to focus your content creation efforts. This post contains affiliate links. When you make a purchase I may get a small commission at no extra cost to you. Find out more here.

Ready to grow your blog? Check out these helpful resources:

• Blogging course ($119.97)
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• Keyword research: KeySearch
• SEO tool for blogging: RankIQ
• Travel affiliate platform for bloggers: Stay22 (get $100 when you get to 100 bookings if you sign up through this link)
• Travelpayouts

How I got into blogging

My background

I was born and raised in Romania. We didn’t travel much when I was little, except for visiting my aunt in Vienna. She was living there and those trips were the highlight of all my school breaks.

I think that having the opportunity to visit Vienna so many times made me fall in love with travel.

Then, in high school, I started to participate in international chemistry olympiads. I represented Romania at 4 international competitions and I had the opportunity to travel to Siberia (twice!), Turkmenistan, Istanbul, and Tokyo.

Then adulting happened. In 2010 I moved to the US for college, then I got a PhD, and then I worked a very demanding job in management consulting for 4 years.

And I stopped traveling because I was either a broke student or I had no time to do it while working 16-hour days at this job.

I didn’t travel to any place, except Romania to see my family, for 13 years. My only focus was to get my advanced degree and perform well at this job.

Once I had some savings from my job and flights were operating again post-pandemic, I decided to travel again. 

But I was in my 30’s. My family lived on a different continent (I was in NYC and my family in Romania). My friends were all working and had limited time off. I don’t have a partner. So I quickly realized that I had nobody to go with.

I had to make a decision: I either go by myself or don’t go at all. I couldn’t bear the thought of not visiting new places, not trying new foods, not exploring new cultures. So I decided to take my first solo trip to Paris.

Why I left the corporate world

When I came back home from Paris I decided that I needed to do it again. I needed to continue my solo travel story. It couldn’t have just one chapter. So I booked another trip, this time to London.

Once I realized how short life is and how much I crave exploring new places, I decided to switch jobs and gain my life back.

So at the beginning of 2023 I left my consulting job and I moved to a corporate America job with a much better work-life balance.

However, this office job was not fulfilling for me at all. And at the same time I had a terrible manager who was making my life miserable. What was supposed to be a dream job on paper was a nightmare. 

I spent many sleepless nights thinking that there must be more to life than this. Long meetings, short lunch breaks spent eating at your desk, creating useless power point presentations, and dealing with all the politics that the corporate culture comes with made me so unhappy. There had to be another way of making a living.

How I started my blog

So I started to ask myself what I would love my life to look like. The answer was easy: travel more, have financial independence and time freedom. 

Now that I was clear on what I wanted I started looking for career opportunities that would match my desired lifestyle. The first career path that I thought would be a great fit was that of a travel influencer.

So I started an Instagram account. I knew nothing about social media and content creation, but I taught myself. And in 9 months I grew my account to 10K followers.

I thought the paid partnerships would come rolling in since that’s what I heard from all the social media gurus. But this wasn’t the case. While I did have a few paid partnerships it wasn’t enough to pay the bills. This is still true at 80K+ followers by the way.

So I went back to the drawing board and I looked for other alternatives in the travel space that actually make you money. And that’s how I found travel blogging.

My results blogging since I started in January 2024

I started my blog in January 2024 and I built it all myself. I never hired and web developer, SEO expert, or marketing guru. Instead, I taught myself how to do everything.

In June 2024, so 5 months in, I was already making $100+ per month from affiliate marketing. Switching to Stay22 was a game changer for me and my earnings. You can read more about my experience using them here.

In December 2024 I was already making over $500 per month from affiliate marketing. Also in December, I got to 10,000 sessions per month and I got into Journey by Mediavine, and ad network for smaller blogs that is still under the Mediavine umbrella.

So I also started to earn through ads. At the beginning I was making around $250 per month through ads.

My traffic continued to grow beautifully and in June 2025 I got to 50,000+ sessions per month and I got accepted into the full Mediavine program.

I started earning $1,000+ from ads alone. And from affiliate marketing I earn $2,500+ per month. So $3,500 per month total.

As you can see, in just 1.5 years as a new blogger I was able to grow my blog to 50K+ sessions per month, got into Mediavine, and earn $3,500+ per month.

So based on these recent results I will argue that blogging is not dead in 2025. It’s very much alive and I think beginner bloggers that start a niche site and focus on high-quality content can create very successful blogs.

Here is a list of reasons why I think blogging will continue to thrive in 2025 and in the future.

Search engines still reward high-quality blogs

Based on my experience, new blogs that publish great content will continue to be shown in search results. Is it as easy as it was 10 years ago to be shown on the first page of results? No.

That’s because there was way less competition back in the day. But the good news is that it’s not impossible to rank well even in 2025 and get blog traffic.

You just need to learn search engine optimization (SEO) and create helpful content for internet users that are looking for answers on the topic you write about.

I knew nothing about SEO when I started but I taught myself how to do it. My entire blog content is optimized for SEO and I do think this is the main reason why I had so much success over the past year and a half.

If you don’t want to watch countless hours of podcast episodes or video content about SEO, I put together a module on optimizing posts for SEO in my blogging course that you can even buy separately. It’s a great way to learn how to do it and I put an affordable price to it so I can help as many people as possible that want to create their own blog.

Nowadays you do need a blogging strategy to succeed, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds. You just have to follow a series of best practices and provide real value to readers. If I could do it, so can you.

Blog posts give your audience more value than social media posts and AI

I feel like with the rise of short-form video and artificial intelligence a lot of people think that nobody reads blog articles anymore. I don’t think that’s true. 

Think about it, if it was true, why do I get about 80,000 visitors to my blog each month?

Blog vs social media

According to Statista there are 5.56 billion internet users worldwide. Only about 2 billion people are on Instagram for example and about 2.5 billion people on Youtube.

So if you’re just going for a social media platform your total audience is less than half of the total people that use the internet. With a blog you have access to all internet users, while with social networks you can access only a smaller part.

At the same time there will always be people who want to read details about a destination. As cool as videos on social platforms can be, you have a limited number of characters you can use for captions.

So you can’t give people a lot of depth. You have enough space just for the highlights or a short answer.

On the other hand, in traditional blogging you can write so much more and provide real value to people. Some people will always crave this.

Blog vs AI

At the same time, there are people who want to read about the recent experiences of people who visited that destination. While AI overviews can give them a few highlights, that’s not enough for a lot of people.

They will still click on the links below the AI overviews to get proper answers for their questions.

The way I look at it, is that social media and AI are just additional competition for a blogger. Now you’re not competing with just other bloggers on who ranks the highest, but you’re also competing with AI blurbs and social media. That’s it. 

As long as you’re smart about your strategy and know how you can compete you can definitely win in 2025. Remember, there are 5.56 billion internet users. Why wouldn’t you be able to get 50,000 of them so you can get into Mediavine? 

AI can help your blog

Another thing I often hear is that AI is destroying blogs and all bloggers should just quit what they are doing and change careers. As I said before, I think AI is just additional competition, but it definitely doesn’t destroy blogs.

Unpopular opinion, but I think AI can even help blogs. But Ioana, how? 

Well, for once, there are so many AI tools that a blogger can now use to reduce their workload. I just want to preface this by saying that I believe in responsible use of AI and that I never use AI to write my blog posts. 

Everything you read on my blog is written by yours truly, not by AI. I do believe this is a key component of how I compete in today’s blogging landscape. My voice and my thoughts and perspective can never be replicated by AI, no matter how much information it scrapes from the internet.

And I think people love it when they read content written by other people. And call me crazy, but with the rise of AI-generated content, I think people will love it even more in the future. They will seek human connection even in long-form content on blogs. 

That being said, bloggers can still use AI to spell check their work. They can brainstorm ideas for new blog posts with AI. They can get advice for their content strategy from AI.

You can treat the AI of your choice as your personal assistant. But don’t write an entire blog post using AI. Blog readers want your voice!

AI as an income stream for bloggers

The other good thing about AI is that in the future bloggers might get paid if AI crawls their website for information.

Cloudfare is working on a pay per crawl feature that will allow bloggers and other publishers to charge AI crawlers to access their content.

This will be a third revenue stream for bloggers besides ads and affiliate marketing. Nobody knows yet how much the AI crawlers will have to pay us. We’ll have to wait and see.

But I think it’s really cool that the industry is evolving and we’re here to see it and experience it all. Just embrace AI for the good it can provide to your blog. And also treat is as additional competition and get smarter about optimizing your content.

Blogs give you more ownership of your audience

As a blogger you have an email list (if you don’t, start one right now!). Which means that you own that email list. No matter what Google updates happen, you can always send emails to your audience to promote new blog posts, affiliate marketing links, and your own digital products.

On the other hand, you don’t own any social media account. You can even have a large following, but you don’t own your audience. There is always a third party involved between you and your audience – the social media platform.

At the same time you have to constantly change your social media strategy for growth. That’s because the algorithm changes every month, sometimes even faster.

Even when you feel like you cracked it, something else changes and what used to work no longer does. So you’re constantly chasing virality and growth but you don’t know exactly what works well.

That’s why there are so many aspiring influencers who are never able to grow their accounts. Growing on social media involves a lot of luck, even though gurus will tell you there is a recipe to success. I truly believe there isn’t.

Blogs are businesses you own

Related to my previous point about owning your audience, you also own your blog. It’s a digital business that you own.

So if one day you decide you don’t want to be a blogger anymore, you can sell your blog. Because it’s an asset and there is a market for it.

There are brokers out there for digital businesses, including blogs. So all the effort you put into growing your blog is not for nothing since you can exit the business and make a lot of money from it.

Depending on how much traffic your blog gets you could sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. So a blog is a real, legitimate business. 

A social media account it not. You can put a lot of effort into growing an account. And let’s say you’re successful and you grow it to 1M followers.

You still can’t sell your account. You can’t exit this social media influencer business. And you can only monetize it while you stay active on social media, but you can’t sell it because at the end of the day you don’t own it.

Final thoughts

I think blogging is very much alive in 2025 and beyond, but you have to be smart about how you compete. Which means that you have to learn SEO, you have to build an email list from day one, and you have to constantly adapt to changes.

If you’re able to do this, you can absolutely build a successful blog. If you want to skip the guesswork and don’t want to waste hours figuring it all out alone, I can help.

In my The Blogging Roadmap Course, I walk you through everything step-by-step:

• Setting up your blog the right way from the start
• Writing posts that are SEO optimized and attract readers
• Earning from your blog through multiple income streams

You’ll go from zero to confident blogger without the overwhelm and you’ll be on your way of owning a successful business.

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Do you want to learn more about blogging? Check out some of my other articles.

Amateur blogging: complete guide to start a blog

Stay22 review: is this affiliate platform the best?

RankIQ review: is this the best SEO tool for blogs?

Stay22 vs Travelpayouts: which platform is the best?

Affiliate marketing for travel bloggers: the best platforms