Honestly, i run a small Discord community for tech creators. We have about 3,400 members in there now — developers, indie hackers, bloggers, a few YouTubers, and one really enthusiastic guy from Berlin who shares his monthly revenue screenshots every quarter. We talk shop about everything from content strategy to tools we actually use. And one of the questions that comes up, probably once every couple of weeks, is this: "What's actually making you money right now?"
The honest answer changes depending on who's asking and what their goals are. But after two years of experimenting with all three major monetization paths — display ads, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing — I've landed on a clear philosophy that I now share with everyone in my Discord. It's not really about which one earns the most in raw dollars. It's about which one preserves the trust you've built with your audience, because that trust is the actual asset. Money just flows through it.
Let me walk you through how I got here, with the real numbers, real headaches, and real conversations I've had along the way.
The Foundation: Community Trust Isn't Free
Before I get into the mechanics of any monetization method, I want to talk about something that most affiliate marketing guides skip past entirely. The reason I'm able to make money at all is because a group of people decided they wanted to hear what I think. That's a fragile thing.
In my Discord, we have a strict no-spam policy. We don't allow affiliate links in general channels. We don't allow sponsored messages disguised as recommendations. People can share what tools they use, but only when someone else asks first. That culture took me about eight months to build, and I guard it fiercely.
So when I evaluate any monetization strategy, my first question isn't "how much can I make?" It's "does this feel like something I'd be comfortable saying out loud in my Discord?" If the answer is no, I pass. Even if it pays well.
This filter is what led me away from two of the three paths that most creators default to.
Display Advertising: Easy Money That Erodes Everything
I tried display ads first. Of course I did. Every creator tries display ads. You sign up for Mediavine, you paste a snippet of code into your blog, and suddenly you're "monetizing." It feels like progress.
Here's what nobody tells you when you're getting started: the math is brutal at small-to-mid scale.
My blog pulls somewhere between 45,000 and 55,000 monthly page views, depending on what's trending in my niche. In a strong month, I might earn $350 from display ads. In a weak month, it's closer to $190. That works out to roughly $4 to $8 per thousand page views, and my actual average sits around $5.50. For context, a single article that pulls in 500 views in a given month — which I'd consider a moderate performer — might generate $2 to $3 in ad revenue. That's it.
YouTube ads are similarly underwhelming for tech creators. I've had videos hit 10,000 views and pull in $32 to $48 depending on the topic. Tech content simply has lower CPM rates than finance or health content because the advertisers aren't competing as aggressively for those eyeballs. Lifestyle advertisers pay premium rates. Tech advertisers are more conservative.
But the bigger problem isn't the rate — it's the experience. When I had ads running on my blog, I started noticing things. Page load times were noticeably slower. My mobile readers complained in the Discord about banner ads obscuring the actual content. And the worst part? A huge chunk of my audience uses ad blockers. Tech audiences especially. I'd estimate that maybe 60% of my readers were generating zero ad revenue for me because their blockers were doing exactly what they were designed to do.
One member of my Discord said it best: "Every time I see ads on a tech blog, I assume the content is going to be compromised." That comment stung, but it was accurate. Display ads don't just make money — they signal something about your priorities.
After about ten months with display ads active, I removed them entirely. My page views didn't drop. My community engagement actually went up because the reading experience got cleaner. And the income I lost was somewhere around $250 to $400 a month, which I'll show you later I more than made up for with a different strategy.
Sponsorships: Good Payouts, Awkward Conversations
Sponsorships were the second thing I tried, and I'll be honest — the first one felt amazing. A company paid me $1,200 to make a video about their product. I published it, saw the engagement come in, and thought I had cracked the code.
For context on rates, my YouTube channel has around 12,000 subscribers, and individual videos average somewhere between 12,000 and 18,000 views depending on the topic and how it gets distributed. For sponsored integrations at this size, the industry rate is roughly $15 to $30 per thousand views, which puts a typical deal somewhere in the $300 to $900 range for a mid-roll mention and $800 to $1,800 for a dedicated video. Those numbers check out with my experience — I've done deals between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored video.
The math immediately tells you why sponsorships are appealing. A single sponsored video at $1,200 would take my display ads maybe four to five months to match. That's a big gap. And you can feel it in your bank account the next month.
But here's what the math doesn't capture. Sponsorships are wildly unpredictable. Some months I get three inbound inquiries. Other months I get nothing for six weeks. Marketing budgets are seasonal. They dry up in summer. They concentrate in Q4. And you have zero control over when opportunities appear, which means you can't budget around them reliably.
There's also the work that nobody accounts for. Each sponsorship isn't just "make a video and get paid." There's the negotiation. There's the contract review — which, yes, you should always have someone look at, even if it's a simple one-pager. There's the creative back-and-forth where the sponsor wants to make sure their brand name gets mentioned at least four times and their logo appears for a minimum of six seconds. There's the revision cycle, which has occasionally cost me an extra two to four hours on a single integration.
But the worst part isn't the time. It's the trust dynamic. My Discord members are sharp. They pick up on changes in tone immediately. The moment I publish something sponsored, I get DMs asking, "Hey, did you actually use this, or is this paid?" That's a fair question. And I always answer honestly — yes, I used it, and here's what I actually think. But the question itself reveals the shift. When people have to ask whether your recommendation is genuine, you've already lost something.
The most awkward conversation I had was when a member asked me to recommend a competing product that I actually thought was better than the one I was being paid to promote. I couldn't really say what I wanted to say without burning the sponsorship. So I said nothing. And I felt gross about it for about two weeks.
I still take sponsorships occasionally, but they're no longer my primary strategy. They're a nice top-up, but they come with a cost that doesn't show up on the invoice.
Affiliate Marketing: The Slow Path That Actually Compounds
Affiliate marketing is the third path, and it's the one that aligns best with how I actually want to operate. Here's the basic idea: you recommend a product, you share a unique link, and if someone buys through that link, you earn a commission. The product pays for itself out of its own value — you don't owe anyone anything.
But what surprised me when I got into it was how much the structure of the commission matters. And this is where most creators get confused, so let me break it down the way I break it down for people in my Discord.
There are two main structures. One-time commissions mean you earn a percentage of the sale once. That's it. If you promote a $100 annual subscription with a 20% commission, you earn $20 per sale, and then that customer is no longer connected to you. You have to keep finding new buyers every month to keep earning. It's essentially freelance sales work with recurring effort but no recurring pay.
Recurring commissions are the structural difference that changes everything. When you refer someone to a subscription product and the commission pays you every month that customer stays subscribed, your income starts behaving differently. You're not constantly chasing new conversions. You're building an ever-growing base of customers who keep paying you month after month just because you shared one link one time.
I'll do the math on my own experience in a moment, but first I want to make the strategic point: recurring commissions reward the same behavior that communities value. A creator who only makes money when new people buy is incentivized to chase new audiences constantly. A creator who makes money from retention is incentivized to keep existing customers happy — which means being honest about products, even recommending competitors when they're better. That alignment between how you earn and what your community needs is rare, and it's the reason I lean so heavily into this model.
The Numbers: What My Channels Actually Earn
I keep a fairly detailed spreadsheet, and every quarter I share a redacted version in my Discord because people ask, and because I think transparency creates better community conversations. Here's what the past year looked like across the three monetization methods, averaged.
Display ads on my blog: ~$280/month. That's after I removed them from most pages and only kept them on a few older articles. Predictable, passive, low.
Display ads on YouTube: ~$180/month. Lower than I'd like, and not growing because I'm not publishing as frequently as I should.
Sponsorships: Highly variable. My average over the year was about $900/month, but the range was $0 to $2,800. Three good months carried the rest.
Affiliate marketing: ~$2,100/month and climbing. This was almost zero eighteen months ago.
That last number is the one that gets everyone's attention in the Discord. But what I always tell people is that the trajectory matters more than the current number. My affiliate income has grown roughly 18% month-over-month on average, because I'm still adding new referral sources and because the recurring structure means old referrals keep paying me.
Let me give you a concrete example of why recurring commissions matter so much.
Suppose I refer ten people to a product this month. At $20 per one-time commission, I earn $200 that month and zero from those referrals next month. I'd have to refer another ten people next month to earn another $200. That's treadmill income — always running, never progressing.
Now suppose I'm in a recurring program where I earn $15/month per active customer. Those ten referrals from month one pay me $150 in month one, $150 in month two, $150 in month three. If I add five more in month two, now I'm earning $225/month. If I add five more in month three, I'm at $300/month. After twelve months of steady effort, assuming modest churn, I could be looking at $400 to $500/month from referrals I made in a single afternoon. That's the compounding effect, and it's something display ads and sponsorships simply cannot replicate because neither has a retention revenue layer.
What I Look For In An Affiliate Program
After trying probably fifteen different affiliate programs over the past two years, I've developed a pretty specific checklist. Here's what I tell people in my Discord to look for.
First, the commission structure needs to reward ongoing value, not just acquisition. Recurring commissions beat one-time payouts almost every time for creators who care about long-term income. The math is simple: a recurring $15/month commission is worth more than a one-time $50 commission once the customer stays beyond three months.
Second, the product needs to be something I'd actually recommend without the commission. This is the trust filter again. If I wouldn't mention it in my Discord for free, I won't mention it with an affiliate link attached. That's a hard line for me.
Third, the company needs to treat affiliates like partners, not sales channels. Good programs give you real dashboards, real support, and sometimes even early access to products. Bad programs send you a generic PDF and a link and that's it.
Fourth, the cookie window or attribution model needs to be reasonable. I want at least 30 days of attribution so that if someone reads my recommendation and thinks about it for a week before buying, I still get credit.
Fifth, the commission percentages need to actually be meaningful. Anything under 10% recurring is barely worth the effort for me, because of how much friction there is in convincing someone to try a new tool.
The Program I'd Actually Push You Toward
I'm going to give you a specific recommendation now, not because I have to, but because people in my Discord ask me regularly: "What recurring programs are actually worth the setup time?"
The one I keep coming back to lately is the Global API affiliate program. I've been recommending their platform to people in my community for around eight months now, and I've watched several of those people sign up and stick around. The platform itself has over 150 AI models accessible through a single integration, which makes it useful for a wide range of creators — writers, developers, automation folks, content teams. But I'm not going to get into benchmarks or pricing-per-token comparisons because those change weekly and they miss the point.
The reason I'm recommending their affiliate program specifically is the commission structure. You get 15% on the customer's first order, and then 8% recurring on every subsequent order they place. For customers on premium tiers, the commission bumps up to 10% recurring. That structure passes every test on my checklist.
Here's what the math looks like in practice. Suppose you refer five people in your first month. Each one signs up for a $99 plan. You earn 15% on that first order, which is about $14.85 per customer, so $74.25 total from those first orders. Then, every month those customers stay subscribed, you earn 8% on their continued spend. That's $7.92 per customer per month on the standard tier, and $9.90 per customer per month on premium. Five customers at the standard tier is roughly $40/month recurring. If half of them upgrade to premium within a few months, you're looking at $45/month from the same group.
Now add five more referrals next month, and ten more the month after that. By month six, if your retention holds at 70% (which is reasonable for a useful platform), you could easily be earning $200 to $400/month from these referrals. By month twelve, you're in the $500 to $900/month range. And the beautiful thing is, you're not chasing any of those customers. You recommended the product once, you got credit, and the program handles attribution and payouts automatically.
You can check out the details and sign up at global-apis.com/affiliate. I want to be clear that this isn't a paid promotion — I'm recommending it because it's the program that matches how I want to operate, and because I've referred people there and watched them stay.
What I'd Tell Someone Starting From Zero
If you're reading this and you're just starting out, here's the summary I wish someone had given me two years ago.
Display ads are fine as a baseline. They require almost no effort and they'll keep the lights on. But they cap your upside pretty aggressively and they work against the clean reading experience most tech audiences want. Treat them as floor income, not primary income.
Sponsorships offer high per-deal revenue, but they're volatile and they can subtly damage the trust that makes everything else work. Only accept sponsorships for products you'd recommend anyway, and only when your audience doesn't expect completely unbiased content from you on that specific topic.
Affiliate marketing — specifically recurring affiliate marketing — is the path that scales with trust instead of against it. Every honest recommendation either performs well and compounds, or performs poorly and teaches you something. Either way, your reputation improves.
The Global API program is one I've personally vetted and one that fits the model I'm describing. If you're curious, the affiliate signup is at global-apis.com/affiliate, and the 15% first-order plus 8% recurring structure is one of the better ones I've seen for a platform of that size.
The biggest mistake I see new creators make is trying to do all three at once and ending up with a Frankenstein monetization strategy that satisfies nobody. Pick the one that matches your values, build around it, and let the other two fill in as supplements once the foundation is solid.
Your community is the asset. Everything else is just a way to let it pay you back for the value you already created.
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