A 300-article general-interest blog crosses ¥1M/month — the numbers Unicoblog put in the bank in 1 year 3 months, and the AdSense it abandoned

Disclosure by showing the bank statement

Blog revenue write-ups are common, but ones that show actual bank transfer records instead of an ASP dashboard screenshot are not. Reona Kobayashi, who runs “Unicoblog®” and also serves as CEO of Unicorn Consulting Co., Ltd., published an article marking “300 articles reached,” which includes bank transfer screenshots for March and May 2021, along with the line: “from around April 2021, monthly transfers started exceeding ¥1 million.”

Reaching that took about 1 year 3 months: the blog launched January 17, 2020, and hit 300 articles on April 7, 2021, tracked down to the exact date. Her stated writing pace, “roughly one article every 1–2 days”, checks out against the article count and elapsed days.

The recorded numbers

One caveat worth flagging: the traffic figure above is presented in the article as an “analytics screenshot from March 2020.” Given the site launched January 17, 2020, reading that as 500,000 PV within two months of launch doesn’t hold up. There’s likely a date discrepancy in the source. We quote the source as stated here, but do not treat the PV figure and the monthly-income figure as corresponding to the same time period.

It’s a “general-interest blog” — but not only that

She states clearly in the article that “it’s become a completely general-interest blog.” No fixed theme; broad subject matter. At the same time, she runs 15+ topic-specialized revenue sites, and states that in terms of actual revenue composition, “the topic-specialized sites” are actually larger.

Treating ¥1 million/month as the achievement of this one general-interest blog alone would therefore be an overstatement. The bank transfer total reflects all affiliate income combined. The article is better positioned as an explanation of that overall revenue picture told through the lens of “a general-interest blogger who wrote 300 articles.”

The decisive factor wasn’t article count — it was swapping revenue channels

The clearest before-and-after in this case isn’t the article count going up. It’s that the primary revenue source shifted from AdSense to ASP affiliate income.

By the numbers: AdSense revenue dropped roughly tenfold, from about ¥100,000/month the prior year to about ¥10,000/month. Yet total bank transfers exceeded ¥1 million/month regardless. What filled the gap was ASPs led by A8.net, plus retail affiliate income via Amazon, Rakuten, and Yahoo! Shopping.

The reason for scaling back AdSense wasn’t purely about profitability, either. She cites the growing burden of managing ad placements, the strict criteria for what counts as a “valid” click, and fatigue from dealing with inappropriate ad content — and now uses it barely at all. Click-based ads run themselves once placed, but you don’t control the payout rate or the ad content shown. This is a decision to remove a revenue source she couldn’t control from the core of her business.

Another concrete tactic she cites is installing a retail-affiliate plugin. Automatic micro-copy promotions injected across the site “clearly increased profitability,” she writes. Rather than rewriting individual articles, this is a lever that improves the funnel across all 300 existing articles at once.

Why revenue grew even as PV stalled

Notably, revenue crossed ¥1 million at a point when traffic wasn’t growing. She notes that peak PV occurred at the 150-article mark, and by 300 articles, visitor count had flattened. She attributes this to self-cannibalization: “there’s actually a lot of overlap between blog posts covering the same content,” a general-interest format side effect where articles compete against each other in search rankings within her own site.

Yet revenue still climbed, because the variable that moved wasn’t PV. What actually shifted was the machinery underneath the traffic:

• Revenue per unit of traffic. Moving from click-based payouts to performance-based ones changes the expected value per visit, even at the same traffic level.
• The funnel. The plugin’s automatic promotions lifted product-link exposure across all articles at once.
• Device fit. Almost every article is read on mobile browsers; she analyzes that mobile-app offers combined with retail products perform well for the same reason. For the same reason, PC banner ads are “barely clicked at all,” with anchor-text links proving more effective.

This was a stretch of improving the conversion rate on existing traffic, rather than a stretch of growing traffic itself.

What didn’t work

• Cannibalization from the general-interest format. More articles meant more internal overlap, and PV plateaued around the 150-article mark. The premise “more articles → more traffic” broke down before reaching 300.
• AdSense’s decline. Watching ¥100,000/month fall to ¥10,000/month shows the risk of designing a blog’s foundation around ad revenue.
• PC banner ads underperforming. They occupy screen space but weren’t clicked, losing out to text links.

Her stated direction going forward is to pursue topic-specialized sites for revenue purposes, “site design matched to the theme handled”, designed around 50 articles and run primarily via rewrites. She hasn’t adopted the “300 articles” milestone itself as a model for what comes next.

How far does this generalize?

What’s reproducible is the revenue-channel overhaul: shifting weight from click-based to performance-based payouts, applying a funnel improvement that hits every article at once, and matching offers to the device readers actually use. None of these require writing new content, and none depend on the size of your existing asset base.

What’s hard to reproduce is the sheer writing volume, 300 articles in 1 year 3 months. A pace of one article every 1–2 days assumes secured discretionary time. On top of that, this operator runs 15+ specialized sites in parallel, and the ¥1 million/month bank transfer is the sum total of all of them. There’s no guarantee that running a single general-interest blog at the same pace alone would reach the same figure. Reading these numbers without factoring in that “this is a combined total” would be a mistake.

Related reading

• Over ¥10 million at peak, and “80% of our articles dropped” — three top bloggers reveal the light and dark sides in one conversation — the same approach of building revenue from combined multiple sites, and the downside phase when search volatility hits.
• 24 Kindle books — accumulating output in a different format; a comparison point for whether unit price or volume was the lever moved.