Keshilog: ¥1.5M a Month in the Telework Boom, Then a Deliberate ¥9.9M Landing — Three Years of a PC-Desk-Gear Blog

“I earned as much as ¥1.5 million in a month, then got carried away, and revenue collapsed.” That is how Kessy, who runs the PC-desk-peripheral blog Keshilog, sums up his three-year report. Amid a blogging scene full of triumphant revenue posts, this one stands out precisely because it is more candid about the “after” than the peak: the ¥1.5 million month brought by a demand shock, the decision to deliberately throttle output to stay under Japan’s ¥10 million consumption-tax threshold, and the slump and loss of motivation that followed, all in a single article.

Keshilog launched on April 1, 2018. It is a solo blog specializing in reviews and buying guides for desk peripherals (PC monitors, mice, keyboards, audio gear) monetized through affiliate advertising. At the three-year mark it held 227 articles in total; the category breakdown shows about 100 posts on mice and 77 on monitors, the classic shape of a niche site stacking articles in a narrow field. New posts come once or twice a week, but “this year I spent far more time maintaining old articles than writing new ones,” he notes. Against the blogging-scene slogan that “beginners should write 1,000 posts,” his response is dry (“I’d be a grandfather by the time I wrote 1,000”) and he chose updating existing articles over piling up new ones. A momentary ¥1.5 million on 227 articles is a number built not on volume but on a tightly chosen, purchase-adjacent niche.

What happened in year three (April 2020 – March 2021)

His month-by-month recap of the year is also revealing as a picture of what surge-type income does to a life: April 2020, “gadget bubble arrives”. July, “bubble over, deleted a mass of posts and drifted”. November, “went so deep into the desk-setup rabbit hole I started apartment hunting”. December, “splurged on the move”. The new year, “burned out, near-NEET.” The revenue wave visibly rocks both his decisions and his daily rhythm, preserved as monthly self-reports.

The spring-2020 surge came from Japan’s ¥100,000 stimulus payments coinciding with the shift to remote work, triggering bulk purchases of PC peripherals. Kessy is level-headed about it: “It’s not like I was winning at SEO, I suspect every gadget blogger was riding high.” He credits the market wave, not his own skill, and annotates his own contemporaneous belief that “this would last forever” as a death flag. As revenue reports go, the account is skewed in the opposite direction from exaggeration.

Optimizing in reverse: staying under ¥10 million

The rarest part of the article is a documented decision not to grow revenue. In Japan, a sole proprietor whose taxable sales exceed ¥10 million a year becomes liable for consumption tax on top of income and residence taxes, and once over the line, dropping back under it the following year does not immediately restore the exemption. Weighing this, Kessy reasoned: “If a lucky punch lands you at some awkward ¥10.5 million, you keep more by just staying under ¥10 million.” From summer through winter 2020 he deliberately eased off on maintaining the blog, steering to a nail-biting landing at ¥9.9●M. (This article describes the system and one person’s decision, it does not recommend any particular tax strategy, details should be confirmed with a tax professional.)

Whether crossing the threshold on a one-off surge is worth it depends, in his framing, on whether you expect to earn ¥12–13 million every year thereafter. Put take-home rather than top-line at the center, and there are moments in a windfall year when the right move is the brake, not the accelerator, a practical side of running a sole proprietorship that most revenue reports never mention.

What the boom left behind

The cost of that landing is recorded just as honestly. The “slacking habit” acquired during the deliberate slowdown proved sticky, and as of March 2021 revenue had not recovered. “I’m not in the red yet, but if this keeps falling, it’s back to job hunting”, a line that shows how much the blog’s income depended on continuous updating and maintenance, more than its author had assumed.

The other honest confession concerns the structure of motivation. A review blog runs on its author’s own gadget lust, “I want this!”, as raw material. The more you review, the duller the thrill, until writing becomes a chore. “I’m painfully aware of how hard it is to turn what you love into work. My motivation is at its three-year low,” he writes. Compare a cruising-speed gadget blog like Kurashikilog, earning ¥150K a month on 116 free articles and 120K monthly page views, and the size of the rebound after a spike stands out sharply.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

The takeaways hold well beyond desk gear. A niche blog’s revenue is heavily amplified by market waves: the ¥1.5 million month was the product of “telework shock × desk-gear niche,” and the author himself does not read it as a skill-based steady state. Sole-proprietor revenue, for its part, has an institutional milestone at the consumption-tax threshold, and in a windfall year, maximizing sales and maximizing take-home can diverge. Deliberate deceleration, lastly, breeds inertia, and the slump can run deeper and longer than intended.

As for limits: ¥1.5 million a month was the peak gust, and the article gives no way to read a normal month’s revenue (dividing the ¥9.9●M year by twelve gives roughly ¥830K a month on average, but the distribution is heavily skewed toward the spring surge). On the durability of blog income, read this alongside the six-years-and-two-months grind to ¥50K a month at Hebo Blog and Tsuzuki Blog’s climb from ¥42K to ¥1M a month in a year: both the rises and the falls differ completely case by case. A boom cannot be reproduced, but as a checklist of what to decide when one arrives, this three-year report is concrete.