116 free articles, 120,000 monthly page views, ¥150,000/month: the revenue breakdown of gadget blog "Kurashikilog"

Stories about earning money on note usually mean selling paid articles. The “Kurashikilog” case is the opposite. Revenue from paid articles: ¥0. Using only 116 free articles, the account pulls in about 120,000 monthly page views and roughly ¥150,000/month in affiliate income, as self-disclosed roughly eight months after starting on note.

The ¥150,000 breakdown

Here’s the March 2025 revenue breakdown he has disclosed.

Operating metrics at the same point in time: 116 articles, 149 followers, roughly 120,000 monthly page views. The prior month’s revenue was also around ¥150,000, so it’s not a one-month spike. As monthly income, it falls within the “¥100,000–200,000” range he himself describes.

What stands out in this breakdown is that product-affiliate income (Amazon + Rakuten = ¥97,737) and lead-gen income (¥53,900) sit at roughly a 2:1 ratio. Most of the articles are gadget reviews, and Amazon links appear to be the main battlefield. Yet more than a third of the total revenue comes from lead-gen deals, which presumably involve far fewer transactions.

Looking at the per-unit economics

He himself illustrates just how thin Amazon Associates’ cut is with a concrete example. His most-read article, pulling 20,000 monthly page views, is a review of the Galaxy S25, but selling a single unit of a ¥129,000 device earns him only about ¥2,500 in commission.

Working backward from that, generating over ¥90,000 from Amazon at that rate would require the equivalent of over 30 unit sales. Against a scale of 120,000 monthly page views, that’s a pretty demanding conversion. That’s exactly why the composition (with lead-gen deals, which pay more per conversion, accounting for over ¥50,000) matters. Baked into this breakdown is an understanding that the articles that rack up page views and the articles that generate revenue are not the same thing.

He himself puts it this way: “page views and the buying audience don’t necessarily line up.” That’s a practical rebuttal to any operation chasing page views alone, the apparent numbers and the actual profitability tend to diverge.

What’s actually working is the tie-in with YouTube, not the articles

He is explicit about what’s driving the trajectory in this case: “Part of why this is working is that it’s tied into YouTube.”

His YouTube channel had 5,000 subscribers when he first wrote this note article, and has since passed 10,000. His note followers number just 149. Reader trust rests not on a follower count within note but on an external channel with 10,000 subscribers. He calls this a “business card of trust.”

This is structurally significant. Gadget reviews tend to read similarly regardless of who writes them. What differentiates them is a single question: is this person actually saying this after using the thing? A video, simply by showing the person holding the physical product and talking, becomes its own evidence. What text can only assert, video presents as a verified fact. The role of the note articles is to bring that trust into the exact moment a reader is deciding whether to buy.

The sequence matters too. He didn’t build a note following and then monetize it. He built trust externally first and brought it into note afterward. The seemingly mismatched combination of 149 followers and ¥150,000/month makes sense once you see this order.

The pace of article output tells the same story. 116 articles over eight months averages 14–15 articles a month, just under one every two days. Not a standout level of prolificness. Reaching 120,000 monthly page views at that volume means each article averages just over 1,000 page views. And the articles that actually rank aren’t only new-product reviews like the Galaxy S25, pieces about cat care and about his own experience monetizing YouTube also rank highly. Despite the “gadget specialist” branding, what’s actually pulling readers in are the pieces he wrote about things he personally went through.

What didn’t work, and the risks he flags

He’s clear about what he considers the failure pattern: articles that “just slap an affiliate link on without buying the product” don’t work. Neither does AI-generated low-quality writing. His stated philosophy is “spend money to buy experience”, articles written purely from the head tend to fail.

This isn’t a moral stance; it’s about unit cost. Writing a genuine hands-on gadget review requires buying the actual device. A Galaxy S25-class handset is an upfront investment north of ¥120,000. That cost functions as a barrier to entry, and, simultaneously, as a differentiator from AI-generated content. He also runs a paid note (roughly ¥100,000/month) under a separate account, and notes that after fees only 70–80% of that revenue reaches him, leading him to conclude that the expense-heavy free gadget articles ultimately yield more net profit than the paid-note-sales model. That’s an extension of this same unit-cost logic.

He also flags several risks. note’s analytics are limited. Getting detailed data requires the business-tier Pro plan at around ¥80,000/month. Some genres run out of material quickly. A side-hustle-focused genre, he notes, might exhaust itself around the 100-article mark. Gadgets don’t run dry as easily because new products keep launching, but that also means updates stop the moment he stops buying new products. Structurally, that’s no different from a business whose inventory dries up when restocking stops.

Concentration of revenue sources is another risk. Over 90% of product-affiliate income comes through Amazon, with Rakuten contributing only ¥5,264. A rate change or account suspension at Amazon Associates would instantly wipe out roughly ¥60,000 of the ¥150,000 total. There’s some diversification into Rakuten, but by dollar amount it’s effectively near-total dependence on a single platform. The fact that lead-gen deals stand as a separate pillar contributing over ¥50,000 functions as a buffer against that concentration.

Conditions and limits of replicability

What’s replicable is the design philosophy: treat note not as a storefront for paid articles but as a blog you stack with free content. Think separately about “articles that get page views” and “articles that generate revenue.” And buy the product before you write about it. None of these three require credentials or connections.

What’s hard to replicate is the 10,000-subscriber YouTube channel. This case’s revenue is the monetization, via note, of trust built externally, and not the product of note alone. Writing the same 116 articles without an existing outside audience is unlikely to reach 120,000 monthly page views. It could be built given enough time, but not in eight months.

There’s also an assumption baked into the cost structure. The model of buying an actual device and reviewing it means cash goes out first. Behind the ¥150,000/month sits a corresponding amount of equipment purchases, and it requires enough household slack to front that money. Anyone starting this as a side hustle needs to plan for months of being cash-negative up front. Looking only at “¥150,000/month from free articles alone” and concluding this is a zero-cost model would be a mistake.

Related reading

• Hitode’s blog income disclosure — a leading example of a domestic blog built over the long term on search traffic
• 24 Kindle books — another route by which an individual turned intangible content into a stock