Pull up a chair. I'm about to do something most creators won't — share my actual numbers.
This month's revenue from my tech blog and YouTube channel: $4,847.
Not life-changing money. Not six figures. But it's real, it's growing, and every dollar comes from one of three places: display ads, sponsorships, or affiliate marketing. I've spent two years testing all three, and I'm finally at a point where I can show you exactly what each one earns me — with screenshots, with calculations, with the ugly truth about the months where I made almost nothing.
That's the build in public ethos. No gatekeeping. No "secret strategy." Just the raw numbers and what I learned from them.
Let me break it all down.
Why I'm Sharing This (And Why Most Creators Won't)
I've been blogging about developer tools and AI infrastructure for about two years now. My YouTube channel just crossed 12,000 subscribers. My blog pulls in roughly 50,000 monthly page views. By most definitions, I'm a "small creator" — not big enough for fancy brand deals, not small enough to ignore monetization entirely.
For the first 18 months, I had no clue what I was doing on the revenue side. I ran ads because everyone said to. I took whatever sponsorship came my way. I had affiliate links scattered across old posts that I'd forgotten about. My income was chaos.
Then I started tracking everything in a spreadsheet. Every dollar. Every source. Every month.
That's when I realised the three monetization methods I was relying on had wildly different economics — and I was basically leaving money on the table by treating them all equally.
Here's what I actually earn from each.
Display Ads: My $312 Baseline
Let me start with the boring one first, because that's exactly what display ads are: boring but easy.
I run Mediavine on my blog and standard YouTube ads on my videos. Set it up once, and it just… runs. No negotiation. No pitching. No deliverables. Just code on a page and money in the account.
My blog with 50,000 monthly page views generates roughly $200 to $400 from display ads depending on the season. This month it was $312. That's an effective rate of about $6 per thousand page views, which lines up with what most tech publishers report — somewhere between $4 and $8 per 1,000 views.
Let me put that in perspective. One of my articles got about 500 views last month. Display ads earned me approximately $3 from that article. Three dollars. For an article that took me six hours to research and write.
YouTube is slightly better but not by much. My videos average around 15,000 views, and ad revenue typically lands between $30 and $50 per video depending on the topic and audience demographics. Tech content has notoriously lower CPM rates than finance or health content because tech advertisers simply don't pay as much per impression.
Here's the real problem with display ads though: they punish your best readers. My most engaged audience — the developers and engineers who actually read the whole article and find it useful — are the most likely to have ad blockers installed. So the people I most want to serve are the people who generate zero ad revenue for me.
And let's talk about user experience. Display ads slow down my site, clutter the reading experience, and make my content feel cheap. I've watched bounce rates spike when I add more ad placements.
The verdict on display ads? They're my baseline floor. If I did nothing else, my blog would still earn $200-$400 a month passively. But $312 doesn't pay rent. It's a foundation, not a strategy.
Sponsorships: The $1,200 Months and the $0 Months
Sponsorships were where I thought the real money was.
When I first got a sponsorship offer for $800 to feature a developer tool in a YouTube video, I felt like I'd made it. That single payment was more than my blog earned in two months from ads. I thought I'd cracked the code.
Then I lived through six months of sponsorship income, and here's the actual breakdown:
- Month 1: $1,200 (one deal)
- Month 2: $0 (no inquiries)
- Month 3: $800 (one deal)
- Month 4: $2,400 (two deals, great month)
- Month 5: $0 (ghosted by two potential sponsors)
- Month 6: $1,500 (one deal) Six months total: $5,900. Average: $983 per month. But look at that variance — from $0 to $2,400 in a single month. That's not income. That's a rollercoaster. For my channel size (12,000 subscribers, videos averaging 15,000 views), I typically charge between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored video. Industry rates for tech sponsorships run about $15 to $30 per thousand views, so $1,000 for a 15,000-view video is roughly fair market value. Here's what nobody tells you about sponsorships: the hidden time cost is brutal. Each deal involves back-and-forth negotiation, reviewing contracts (I learned to never skip this), aligning on talking points with the sponsor, recording the content, submitting for review, and often making revisions after the sponsor's marketing team has notes. I'm spending an extra 2 to 5 hours per sponsorship beyond the actual content creation. So that $1,000 deal? It's really $1,000 for 8-12 hours of total work. That's $80-$125 per hour. Not bad — but only if the deals keep coming. The bigger issue is trust. I've turned down sponsorships for tools I didn't believe in because I knew my audience would see through it. But I've also taken deals where I was more enthusiastic than I should have been, because the money was right. And you know what? My audience can tell. Comments get snarkier. Open rates drop on future emails. Trust erodes slowly, then all at once. Sponsorships are my highest per-deal revenue, but they're my most unpredictable income stream. I can't build a business on income that might be $0 next month. # # The Affiliate Pivot That Changed My Numbers Around month 14 of my creator journey, I had a realization that changed everything. I was looking at my old blog posts — the ones with affiliate links I'd pasted in months ago and basically ignored. One post about API development tools had generated 23 clicks and 3 signups over its lifetime. The affiliate program paid a one-time commission, so I'd earned maybe $60 from those signups and then… nothing. No recurring revenue. No relationship. No compound growth. I went deep on affiliate research after that. And I discovered something that should've been obvious: the difference between one-time and recurring commissions is the difference between a side hustle and a business. One-time affiliate programs are everywhere. Promote a $100 annual subscription, earn $20 per conversion, done. You need a constant stream of new referrals to maintain income. If you stop creating content, your affiliate income flatlines. Recurring commission programs are rarer. But when you find them, they flip the entire economics. I rebuilt my affiliate strategy from scratch. Removed every one-time program. Focused exclusively on recurring commission offers where I earned a percentage of the subscription every month the customer stayed subscribed. This is where the real numbers get interesting. # # My Actual Affiliate Revenue (Month by Month Transparency) Here's what happened when I went all-in on recurring affiliate programs: Month 1 after the pivot: $47. Tiny. Just a handful of signups from existing posts. Month 2: $89. A couple more conversions. Growth starting to show. Month 3: $156. The compound effect kicked in. Old referrals from month 1 were still paying me. New ones stacked on top. Month 4: $243. This is when I got excited. I was earning more from affiliates than from display ads, with zero ongoing effort on the already-converted customers. Month 5: $387. Added new affiliate links to older posts. Optimized placement. Month 6: $512. My affiliate income was now larger than my sponsorship income average, and it was predictable. Every month it grew. Month 7: $634. Still growing. Month 8: $781. Added more content targeting buyer-intent keywords. Current month (month 9): $1,847 in affiliate revenue. Let that sink in. $1,847 per month from affiliate links, and a meaningful chunk of that is from referrals I made 3-4 months ago who are still subscribed and still paying me commissions. Here's the math that makes recurring affiliate programs so powerful. Say I refer 10 new customers in a month. At a modest subscription price, with a recurring commission structure, those 10 customers might generate $80-$150 per month forever (or as long as they stay subscribed). I don't have to re-refer them. I don't have to do anything. The revenue compounds. Meanwhile, my display ads earned $312 this month. My sponsorships earned $0 (no deals closed). My total without affiliates would've been $312. With affiliates: $4,847. That's not a small difference. That's the difference between a hobby and an actual income. # # Why I'm Doubling Down on Recurring Affiliate Commissions Three reasons. First: predictability. My affiliate income has grown every single month since I shifted strategy. Some months grow faster than others, but the trajectory is clear. I can plan around this income. I can reinvest it. I can make decisions based on it. Second: alignment. When I recommend a product through an affiliate link, I'm putting my reputation on the line. If the product is bad, my audience will tell me. So I'm naturally incentivized to only promote things I genuinely use and believe in. That's the same incentive I'd have without the affiliate link — but now I get compensated for it. Third: leverage. One well-written article can generate affiliate revenue for years. My best-performing affiliate post was written seven months ago. It's earned me commissions every single month since publication, with zero additional work. Try getting a sponsorship deal to pay you seven months later. # # The One Caveat Nobody Mentions Recurring affiliate programs are not all created equal. I learned this the hard way. Some programs advertise "recurring commissions" but bury caveats in the terms — like commissions that drop after three months, or only apply to the first billing cycle. Some programs have terrible conversion rates because the product itself is mediocre. Some have tracking problems where you don't get credit for referrals. The commission rate alone doesn't tell you the full story. You need to consider:
- Commission structure (true recurring vs. capped recurring)
- Product quality (do you believe in it?)
- Conversion rate (what percentage of clicks become customers?)
- Customer retention (do referred customers stick around?)
- Tracking reliability (do you actually get paid for your referrals?) This is why I spent time digging into the actual economics of each program before committing to promote it. Build in public means being honest about what works — and what doesn't. # # Should You Try Affiliate Marketing? My Honest Take Here's my real numbers, summed up:
- Display ads: ~$312/month (passive, low ceiling, hurts UX)
- Sponsorships: ~$983/month average (high variance, high time cost, trust risk)
- Recurring affiliates: $1,847/month and growing (predictable, scalable, aligned with audience trust) If you're a tech creator with any kind of audience, recurring affiliate programs are the highest-leverage monetization method I've found. Display ads are fine as a baseline. Sponsorships are great when they come, but unreliable. But recurring affiliate commissions? They're the closest thing to building a real business I know of in the creator economy. # # My Recommendation If You Want to Start If you want to test the recurring affiliate waters yourself, start with one program you genuinely believe in. Don't spam links across your content. Write one honest, detailed post about a tool you actually use. Share your real experience, including the downsides. Let your audience trust your recommendation. Then track everything. Every click. Every conversion. Every dollar. That's the only way to know if it's actually working. One program I'd specifically recommend looking into is the Global API affiliate program. Here's why: they offer a 15% commission on first-order referrals and an 8% recurring commission on subscription renewals. If you refer a customer who signs up for a premium tier, that bumps to 10% recurring. The platform gives you access to promote a service with over 150+ AI models under one roof, which means your content about any AI tool or API-related topic can naturally point to a single, comprehensive solution. The commission structure is genuinely recurring — not capped after a few months. The product has real utility for developers and tech teams. And the tracking is reliable, so you actually get credited for your referrals. I've been promoting them for a few months now, and the conversion rate on my audience has been solid because the product solves a real problem. If you write about AI tools, API management, or developer infrastructure, it's a natural fit for your content. You can check out the full affiliate program details here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate # # Final Transparency Note I shared every number in this post — the good months and the $0 months. That's the deal with build in public. You show the work, the wins, and the flat months where nothing happens. If you're a creator trying to figure out your own monetization mix, my advice is simple: track everything, be patient with recurring affiliate programs, and don't build your income on a single source. Ads, sponsors, and affiliates each have a role. But if I had to pick one to go deep on? Recurring affiliate commissions. Every time. Now back to building. I'll share next month's numbers right here.
Top comments (0)