How We Make Money as Travel Content Creators (Full Breakdown)
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Last updated on April 22, 2026
One of the most common questions we get asked is how we make money as travel content creators. Especially for those who don’t understand the world of content creation, it’s a huge surprise to learn people actually earn a living documenting their travels.
But travel content creation is a very viable (and popular) way to earn a living in 2026.
We’ve been making money as travel content creators since 2019, although it’s only recently earned enough to sustain us with a full-time salary. We know traveling for a living and earning money sharing your experiences sounds like a dream (it can be), the goal of writing today’s post is to be transparent about sharing how we exactly make money as travel content creators.
The goal is to answer all of you curious Karens out there, but also to give you insights into the various ways you can earn money as a travel content creator today. So, without further ado, here is how we make money as travel content creators, Eat See TV.
Table of Contents
What does being travel content creators mean?
Travel content creators are people who earn money from documenting and sharing curated content around travel. This can be writing a blog post (like I’m doing here), creating a reel for Instagram or TikTok, taking photographs or videos for a tourism board or travel company, or making YouTube videos.
Often confused for influencers, travel content creators are distinct. Rather than solely relying on their personal influence from social accounts (although they can also do that), they may also use various types of travel content creation to earn a living.
For example, they could take photos or videos for a company to use, called user-generated content (UGC). They never actually post that content to their own channels (influencing), but they are still creating travel content. The most common avenues of making money as travel content creators are:
- Making Youtube videos
- Creating UGC (user-generated content)
- Working with sponsors/brand partnerships
- Having a blog (and earning affiliate and ad revenue from it)
- Selling digital or physical products
- Ad revenue from Facebook or TikTok (Instagram does not have this)
- Affiliate income (referring brands and products you use and love to others)
How we make money on YouTube
Our YouTube channel is quickly becoming one of our main sources of income. This was an extremely challenging income avenue to create. But now, after seven years, it’s starting to pay us a fair salary.
1. YouTube Adsense
We earn money from YouTube in two ways. The first is revenue from Google AdSense. Every time a viewer watches an ad played before, during, or after our video, we earn a small commission from Google Adsense. Here is what we made in 2024 from Google Adsense (YouTube ads-only).
With 3.2 million views in 2024, we earned $11.05 for every 1,000 views (RPM). This is a pretty good RPM (and a 14% increase over last year). However, niche industries like real estate investing, how-to-make-money channels, and business-focused channels have a much higher RPM, typically around $15 – $20 or more.
There isn’t a single formula for how much you can earn per view on YouTube. The amount we earn depends on what the advertisers want to pay based on the geography of the viewers, content length, and content topic. Meaning, our AdSense revenue is changing constantly.
🚨 If you enjoy watching a creator on YouTube, help them out by watching the ads played on their videos. This comes at no cost to you and goes a long way in helping compensate them for the work and effort that goes into running a YouTube channel.
2. Brand partnerships
The second avenue of income we make from YouTube is through sponsorships. We partner with companies that we use and believe in to help promote their services on our channel or blog through a one-time payment or a recurring basis.
This avenue makes up the majority of our YouTube income today. If you ever see an ad in our videos and are interested in that product or service, help us out by using our special link to learn more. Again, this comes at no extra cost to you and goes a long way in helping us as creators.
Brand partnerships require a lot of effort on our part to keep going. We have to seek out companies we trust and believe in, find the right point of contact, and then negotiate a worthwhile deal for both parties.
After that, we have to write a script, film the ad, send it for their review, and share it with our audience. Partnerships do pay well, and there is nothing better than getting paid to promote a place or company you use and believe in (something we naturally do already), but it’s a very active way to earn money.
3. Make Money While Traveling by Blogging
Blogging is an incredible way to make money while traveling, sharing your travel experiences in helpful, curated online blog posts. These guides can help people plan upcoming trips, discover new hikes or places to visit, or provide recommendations on where to stay and what to do.
1. Make money from blogging with ads
When you gain enough monthly traffic (called sessions), you can request to join an AdSense program where you earn money from ads naturally placed on your site. In 2024, we were accepted into Grow by Mediavine. This is a beginner AdSense program for those with less than 50,000 monthly sessions and earn anywhere between $200 to $1,300 a month.
There are several other high-traffic premium blogging AdSense programs like Raptive and Mediavine that pay more money in ad revenue. However, they require a minimum of 50,000 sessions per month, making it harder to get in.
1. Make money from blogging with affiliates
Ad revenue isn’t the only way to make money while traveling from blogging. We also make money from our blog through affiliate programs. Each time we recommend a tour, stay, product, or other service, we earn a portion of the sale. If we write a blog about where to stay in Madrid, for example, if someone clicks through our links to book a stay, we earn a percentage of the booking sale.
There are loads of affiliate programs to join, like Avant Link, ShareASale, Travel Payouts, or Stay22. Stay22 is an AI-powered affiliate platform that helps me manage my favorite tours, hotels, and hotel or vacation rental platforms in one place.
They have interactive maps and AI scripts that help me link affiliate opportunities naturally to earn more. To date, I’ve earned over $4,500 from this platform alone! If you want to join Stay22, click here (it’s free to join).
Blogging requires a lot of work and dedication, but if you learn how to succeed in the blogging world, you can make a lot of money from it and quite passively.
4. Create UGC (User-Generated Content)
Another avenue to make money while traveling is creating user-generated content (UGC). UGC is content we create and give to the company for their marketing purposes, such as paid ads on social media, Google, or for their website and other media.
We don’t post UGC to our accounts and create content for their desired audience, product, services, or needs.
UGC is a great way for creators who don’t have a big following but know how to make high-quality photos and videos for marketing purposes to make money. You often don’t have to show your face and can focus on creating content for products you already use and love.
5. Selling digital products
After traveling to Iceland and Mexico, we compiled our experiences into a digital travel guide. These guides are super extensive and took months to create. They took our first-hand experience on these epic road trips into a concise downloadable format.
Ultimate Iceland Travel Guide: 10 – 14 Day Ring Road Trip
Iceland is a rugged country filled with vast beauty, rich history and culture, and amazing adventures. Taking a road trip is one of the best ways to see the country and thanks to the ring-road which circumvents the island, you can easily traverse Iceland’s unique and breathtaking landscape with ease. With 6 distinct regions, determining…
You can create digital products for almost anything. How to start a YouTube channel, how to take quality photos, how to code, how to sew, or how to invest are just a few examples of potential products. However, I mention this to show you that digital products can be an extremely viable way to earn money while traveling more passively.
6. Affiliate Income
The last way we make money while traveling full-time is via affiliate income. We have affiliate relationships with dozens of companies we use and believe in.
This can include products from Amazon, REI, or Pact (our favorite sustainable clothing), Lectric e-bikes, renting a camper van with Iceland Happy Campers, ordering replacement parts or other RV items from Etrailer or services like a rental car, travel insurance, or GetYourGuide, which offers thousands of different tours.
Anytime you use our special link to purchase that product or service, we earn a percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. We only recommend services or products we use and would have already recommended (even if we weren’t getting paid for it), so it truly is a win-win for everyone.
💵 We earn around $1,000 – $2,000+ per month from affiliate income on average. The more relationships we have, and the more we promote them across our different channels (YouTube, Instagram, and our blog), the more we typically earn.
7. Make Money While Traveling by Freelance Writing
In 2019, Liz landed a freelance writing gig with Millionacres, a Motley Fool Company. It was my first branch into freelance writing. I found the writing opportunity by chance, the day I signed up on FlexJobs.
It was the first post I applied to, and luckily, I was hired. Millionacres.com was all about real estate investing, making it the perfect fit for my experience and knowledge in this arena. While I had this job for roughly 3 years, it made up a substantial portion of our income, where I earned several thousand dollars per month.
In 2023, that opportunity came to a close. Thankfully, I was able to find another writing job with US News Real Estate, and have since written for Homes.com, Realtor.com, and even NatGeo! 😱 Freelance income can be high-paying but an inconsistent way to make money while traveling.
So, as you can see, there are a lot of ways to make money as travel content creators. The path there will look different for everyone, and how much you earn will also depend on your views (reach), audience interests, niche, and quality of content.
