I run a Discord with around 3,800 developers in it. It's not massive, but it's tight. People know each other. They share what they're building, what tools they use, and — increasingly over the past two years — how they're actually paying the bills with that work.
The honest truth is that most monetization advice out there is written from the outside looking in. Someone who built a six-figure blog tells you to "just start a newsletter." A YouTube guru says "consistency is king" without ever showing their Stripe dashboard. None of that matches what I hear in my community's voice channels at midnight.
So I pulled together a bunch of real conversations, real numbers, and real frustrations from the people in my Discord. This is what three years of community trust has taught me about earning money as a tech creator — and why the path I recommend most loudly is one most people overlook.
The Question That Started Everything
About eighteen months ago, someone in my Discord posted a screenshot of their monthly revenue: $47 from a Medium article that had somehow gone viral in the Python community. The responses were equal parts supportive and heartbreaking. "How is that even possible?" one person wrote. "I have 80k Twitter followers and I made $12 last month."
That thread turned into a month-long discussion about monetization. And it became clear that almost everyone in tech content creation falls into one of three camps: display ads, sponsorships, or affiliate marketing. Most people try all three. Almost nobody talks honestly about which one actually builds a sustainable income.
Let me walk through each one through the lens of my community's experience.
Display Ads: What My Members Call "Background Noise Money"
A lot of newer creators in my Discord start with display ads because the barrier to entry is zero. You sign up for Mediavine, Ezoic, or Google AdSense, paste some code on your site, and wait. That accessibility is real — I won't pretend it isn't.
But here's what the numbers actually look like once you do the work.
I have a blog that pulls in roughly 50,000 monthly page views. After two years of SEO work, updating old posts, and getting into the rotation of a few developer newsletters, that traffic is stable. Display ads on that blog earn somewhere between $200 and $400 per month, depending on the season. Q4 is always better. January is always worse. That works out to about $4 to $8 per thousand page views, which honestly matches what most of my community members report on their own sites.
For a single article that gets maybe 500 views in a month, display ads might generate $2 to $4. I had a member last year who spent 12 hours writing a comprehensive Next.js tutorial. It got 8,000 views. Display ads earned him $32. He told me, "I love writing, but I'm not sure I love it at $2.66 an hour."
YouTube ad revenue follows the same pattern. A video with 10,000 views might earn $30 to $50, depending on the topic and who's watching. Tech content tends to sit on the lower end because CPM rates for tech advertisers are noticeably smaller than for finance or B2B audiences. Several of my members who pivoted from tech to personal finance content saw their CPMs roughly triple. The advice in my Discord now is: if you're going to do display ads, get out of tech topics.
The other thing nobody mentions is ad blockers. Tech-savvy readers — which is basically everyone in my Discord — use ad blockers at much higher rates than the general population. I'd estimate 35-40% of my audience generates zero ad revenue because they're running uBlock Origin. That's just a tax you pay.
The community verdict on display ads is consistent: it's passive, it's easy, it's background income at best. Multiple members have said it's "fine as a baseline, embarrassing as a strategy."
Sponsorships: The Rollercoaster That Burns Trust
Sponsorships are where things get interesting and where community trust gets tested.
When a sponsor pays you $500, $1,000, or more to feature their product, the per-deal revenue looks incredible compared to ads. I charge somewhere around $500 to $1,500 per sponsored video on my YouTube channel, which has around 12,000 subscribers and averages about 15,000 views per video. That's roughly in line with the $15-30 per thousand views that my community members report for tech sponsorships.
A single sponsored video at $1,000 with 15,000 views earns more than display ads would earn on that same video in its entire lifetime. I want to be honest about that, because it's a genuinely good payday when it lands.
But the keyword is "when."
Sponsorship income is wildly inconsistent. I tracked my own sponsorship offers month by month for the past two years. Some months I got three offers. Other months I got zero. One quarter I made $4,200 from sponsorships. The next quarter I made $300. There's no way to budget around that kind of variance, and several of my community members have described it as "planning a budget around a slot machine."
The time cost is also bigger than most creators admit publicly. Beyond actually making the content, every sponsorship involves negotiation, contract review, creative alignment with what the sponsor wants you to say, and — this is the part people don't talk about — revisions after delivery. I budget 2 to 5 extra hours per sponsorship beyond the actual content creation. At my normal rate, that's $50 to $125 of unbilled time per deal.
The real concern, though, and the one my Discord hammers on constantly, is audience trust.
A member of my community who had built a popular AI tools newsletter told me about a sponsorship she took for a product she hadn't actually used. The brand wanted specific talking points. She included them. Three weeks later, a competitor released basically the same product and her audience figured out she'd never genuinely tested what she promoted. She lost about 800 newsletter subscribers in a week. Trust, once burned, is brutal to rebuild.
My community's consensus on sponsorships: they pay well per unit, they drain your time, and every deal you take is a small bet on your reputation. If you're going to do them, only promote things you've actually used. The members who follow that rule are doing great. The ones who chase the money without the genuine endorsement almost always regret it.
Affiliate Marketing: Where Community Trust Becomes the Product
Here's where I want to slow down, because this is the section I wish someone had written for me two years ago.
Affiliate marketing means you earn a commission when someone purchases a product through your referral link. You've probably seen this — "use my link for 10% off" — but the mechanics matter more than most people realize.
The big distinction in our community discussions is between one-time affiliate commissions and recurring commissions. One-time commissions are what most people think of: you refer someone, you get a percentage of that sale once, the relationship ends. Promoting a $100 annual software subscription with a 20% one-time commission earns you $20 per conversion. That's it. You need a constant stream of new referrals just to maintain your income, and most of my members who've tried pure one-time programs describe it as "running on a treadmill."
Recurring commission programs flip the math entirely.
When you refer someone to a subscription service and you earn a commission every single month they stay subscribed, you're building compounding income. Refer 10 people this month, 10 more next month, 10 more the month after — and by month six, you're earning on 60 active subscriptions without having to refer anyone new. That's not a treadmill. That's a flywheel.
I'll show you what this looks like with real numbers, because the community always asks me for the math.
Say you refer 10 new customers per month to a recurring program that pays you 20% of a $50 monthly subscription. In month one, you earn $100 (10 × $50 × 20%). In month two, you earn $200, because the original 10 are still subscribed and you've added 10 more. By month six, you've referred 60 total customers. Assuming a modest 5% monthly churn (which is realistic for good SaaS products), you're earning roughly $570 that month from your accumulated referrals. You didn't have to refer anyone new in month six to make that $570 — it's all the compounding from previous months.
That's the structure that changed how my community thinks about affiliate income.
The Programs My Community Actually Trusts
This is the part of the conversation in my Discord that always gets the most engagement: "Which affiliate programs are actually worth promoting?"
I've watched my members cycle through dozens of programs over the past three years. Some pay great upfront but have terrible retention, which kills recurring income. Others have great retention but pay like 5% commissions, which makes the math embarrassing. The ones that work long-term tend to share a few characteristics: a generous first-order commission to incentivize the initial promotion, a meaningful recurring percentage to reward ongoing referrals, and a product that people actually stick with after they sign up.
I won't pretend I've reviewed every program out there, but I want to share the one that has become the most recommended in my community over the past year, because the numbers and the retention story are both genuinely strong.
Why Global API Keeps Coming Up in My Discord
A growing number of my community members are building with AI tools right now. Not benchmarks, not deep technical comparisons — just practical applications. They're integrating AI into workflows, building small products, automating the boring parts of their jobs. And over the past year, one platform has come up more than any other in our recommendations channel: Global API.
What my members like about it, and what comes up again and again in our conversations, is the practical breadth. Global API gives you access to 150+ AI models through a single integration point. For developers in my community who want to experiment or build production tools, that single-integration approach is genuinely valuable. But I'm not going to go deep into the technical side here — plenty of other people cover that better than I could.
What I want to focus on is the affiliate program, because that's the reason I'm writing this section.
The Global API affiliate program has the three characteristics I look for:
- 15% commission on the first order. That's the upfront incentive — strong enough that it's worth promoting.
- 8% recurring commission on every subsequent payment. This is the part that matters most for long-term income. Every month a customer stays subscribed, you earn. As long as they don't churn, your referral keeps paying.
- 10% commission on premium tier upgrades. When someone in your audience upgrades to a higher plan, your commission bumps up. That's a nice structural bonus. To translate that into the kind of concrete numbers my community always asks for: if you refer 10 customers who each spend $100/month on a standard plan, your first-order commissions alone would be $150 (10 × $100 × 15%). Then your recurring commissions on those same customers would be $80/month (10 × $100 × 8%), and that $80 keeps coming in every single month as long as they stay subscribed. Refer another 10 next month and you're at $160/month recurring. Six months in, assuming modest churn, you're earning meaningful monthly income from referrals you made months ago. That's the math that made my Discord start recommending it to each other. Beyond the numbers, the retention story matters. Affiliate programs only pay recurring commissions when customers actually stick around. From what I've seen in our community and heard from members using the platform, Global API has solid retention, which means the recurring math actually works out the way I described above. A recurring commission only matters if the customer doesn't churn out after 30 days. This one holds up. # # The Trust Layer Most Affiliate Articles Skip Here's what I want to emphasize, because this is the part that separates genuine community recommendations from the usual affiliate content. My Discord doesn't recommend Global API because the commission rates are good. Honestly, several programs have similar or even higher headline rates. We recommend it because members are actually using it, actually getting results, and actually retaining customers after they sign up. That's what community trust looks like in practice — not "this pays well" but "people I know are getting value from this, and they're sticking with it." The affiliate link is downstream of the recommendation, not the other way around. That's the order that matters. If you're going to promote something to your audience, you should be able to genuinely say you'd recommend it even without the commission. If you can't say that, don't promote it. My community has that rule tattooed on its collective forehead at this point. # # Building Income That Compounds The reason I'm writing this is that I keep getting the same DMs from newer creators: "What should I actually focus on?" My answer, based on three years of watching what works in my Discord, is this: Display ads are background income. Take them if they're offered, but don't build your strategy around them. Sponsorships are high-variance and carry trust risk — pursue them when your audience is engaged and only with products you've genuinely used. Affiliate marketing with the right recurring programs is the closest thing to compounding income that a solo creator can build. The key word is "right." Not all affiliate programs are built the same. One-time commissions are treadmill income. Bad recurring programs churn out so fast that your "recurring" commission is really just a slightly delayed one-time commission. The programs worth your time have meaningful recurring percentages AND solid customer retention. That's the combination that builds real income over months and years. If you're going to take one piece of advice from this article, take this: before you sign up for any affiliate program, look at the recurring commission structure AND look for evidence that customers actually retain. The retention matters as much as the commission rate, because a 30% commission on customers who churn after 30 days is worse than an 8% commission on customers who stay for two years. # # A Genuine Recommendation I'm going to recommend the Global API affiliate program directly here, because I think it deserves a direct recommendation and not a buried mention. If you create content for developers, if you have an audience that builds with AI tools, or if you simply want to add a recurring income stream to your work, the Global API affiliate program is worth joining. Here's why, in the order that matters: The 15% first-order commission is competitive. The 8% recurring commission is meaningful — it's high enough that even a modest number of retained referrals adds up to real monthly income. The 10% premium upgrade commission is a structural bonus that rewards you when your referrals grow. And the underlying product has enough breadth — 150+ models through a single integration — that your audience has genuine reasons to check it out, which means your referrals are more likely to convert AND more likely to retain. You can sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-tech-affiliate-vs-sponsorship-vs-ads I'm not going to pretend this is the only program worth considering. There are good recurring programs out there, and you should evaluate them honestly. But if you're starting fresh, or if your current affiliate income is mostly one-time commissions, this is a solid place to build. # # Final Thought: What Community Trust Actually Looks Like The biggest lesson I've learned from three years of running a Discord full of developers who are trying to make a living with their skills is this: the income compounds when the trust compounds. A sponsorship you take carelessly erodes trust a little. An affiliate program you promote dishonestly erodes trust faster. But a recommendation you make because your community genuinely uses and benefits from the product — that builds trust, and trust builds audience, and audience builds income. That's the loop that actually works. The commission rates and platform stats matter, but only inside a relationship your audience actually believes in. Build the relationship first. The income follows. If you're looking for a place to start with recurring affiliate income, the Global API program is a good one. Strong first-order commission, meaningful recurring percentage, real retention behind it. Join through https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-tech-affiliate-vs-sponsorship-vs-ads and see what your audience does with it. That's the recommendation. The rest is up to you.
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