I gotta say, i'm going to be completely transparent with you here. For the past two years, I've been running a tech blog and YouTube channel on the side while holding down a full-time job. And because I'm deep in the build in public community, I started tracking every single dollar that came in from each monetization method I tried. Not estimates. Not vibes. Actual numbers, pulled from dashboards and spreadsheets.
This post is the full breakdown. I'm sharing monthly income figures, the ugly parts, the surprises, and the one revenue stream that completely changed my math. If you're a creator trying to figure out where to put your energy, this should save you a year of trial and error.
Why I Started Sharing My Numbers Publicly
A little context first. I've always been a bit obsessive about spreadsheets, and when I launched my tech blog back in early 2023, I created a single Google Sheet called "Content Income Tracker." Every sponsorship payment, every ad payout, every affiliate commission — it all goes in there. The first month I made $47 from the blog. I remember because I screenshotted the dashboard and posted it on X. People went wild for it.
That's when I realized how hungry creators are for honest income data. Most "how to monetize" posts are full of vague claims and aspirational nonsense. Nobody shows you the $47 months. Nobody shows you the months where a sponsorship falls through and your revenue drops by 70%.
So I'm doing it differently. Here's the real picture.
Display Ads: The Revenue Floor (And It's a Low Floor)
Let me start with the one everyone thinks of first: display advertising. You slap some Google AdSense or Mediavine code on your site, enable YouTube ads, and wait for the money to roll in. That's the theory, anyway.
Here's my actual data. My blog pulls in roughly 50,000 page views per month at this point. That sounds decent until you see the payout. AdSense sends me somewhere between $200 and $400 monthly, depending on the season (Q4 is consistently better because advertiser budgets spike during the holidays). That's an effective rate of $4 to $8 per thousand page views. For any single article that gets around 500 views in a month, I might pocket $2 to $4 from the ads on that page.
YouTube has been slightly better per impression but still nothing to write home about. A video hitting 10,000 views typically lands me $30 to $50 in ad revenue. Tech content has notoriously lower CPMs than finance or lifestyle because tech advertisers simply don't pay as much per thousand impressions. I'm in a niche where readers are budget-conscious and ad-blocker-happy, which makes things even worse.
The honest truth? Display ads are the passive income baseline. They require almost zero effort to maintain, but they also generate almost zero growth. I have done nothing to my ad setup in 14 months and the revenue is essentially the same. There's no compounding. No momentum. Just a slow trickle.
My 12-month ad total: roughly $3,800. That's an average of $317 per month across both channels combined.
Sponsorships: The Revenue Spike (With a Lot of Baggage)
Next up: sponsorships. This is what most creators chase because the per-deal numbers look insane compared to ads. And they are. But there are major caveats I didn't fully appreciate until I lived through them.
My YouTube channel has around 12,000 subscribers right now, and my videos average about 15,000 views within the first month. Based on standard industry rates for tech content — which hover around $15 to $30 per thousand views — I charge between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored video. A single deal at the higher end of that range pays more than my display ads earn in an entire month from my entire blog.
Sounds great, right? Here's the part nobody talks about.
Volatility is brutal. Some months I get three inbound sponsorship inquiries. Other months I get zero. November 2023 was a $2,400 month for sponsorships. February 2024 was $0. You cannot build a reliable income stream on a foundation that swings that wildly. My monthly income reports show a jagged sawtooth pattern, and that's exhausting to live with.
The hidden time cost is real. Each sponsorship isn't just "record the video and collect the check." There's outreach and negotiation. There's the contract review. There's usually a creative brief from the sponsor with specific talking points or product features they want mentioned. Then there are revision requests after I deliver the draft. I tracked my hours for a quarter and the overhead added 2 to 5 hours per sponsorship beyond the actual content production. At my effective hourly rate, some of those "high-value" deals weren't actually that valuable.
The trust tax is the scariest part. This is the one that keeps me up at night. Every time I take a sponsored deal, I know a chunk of my audience assumes I'm being paid to shill. And honestly? Sometimes they have good reason. I've done sponsorships for products I genuinely use, and I've done a couple for products that were fine but not amazing. The audience can usually tell the difference, and every misaligned recommendation chips away at the trust I've built.
My 12-month sponsorship total: roughly $11,200. That's an average of $933 per month, but with massive variance and significant time investment.
Affiliate Marketing: The Revenue Stream That Actually Compounds
Now we get to the thing that genuinely changed my business. Affiliate marketing was the third revenue stream I tested, and I initially dismissed it. My thinking was: "I'm going to send my audience to someone else's product and earn a small percentage? That seems like a waste of time compared to a $1,000 sponsorship check."
I was wrong. Spectacularly wrong.
The key insight I missed was the difference between one-time and recurring commissions. Let me walk you through the math because this is the part that opened my eyes.
One-Time Commissions: Fine, But Limited
Most traditional affiliate programs — think SaaS tools, software, courses — pay a one-time commission. If you promote a $100 annual software subscription and the program offers a 20% commission, you earn $20 per signup. That's a nice bump. But the moment the customer subscribes, your relationship with that revenue ends. You need a constant flow of new referrals just to maintain the same income level.
I did this for about four months with a few different programs. The income was decent but flat. Every month looked basically the same. I was on a treadmill.
Recurring Commissions: The Game Changer
Then I discovered programs that pay recurring commissions. The economics are completely different. Instead of earning $20 once, you earn a percentage of that customer's payment every single month they stay subscribed. Now we're talking about a revenue stream that compounds over time.
I want to be specific here because this is the most important part of the post. The program that currently sits at the top of my affiliate dashboard — and it's not even close — is Global API. They offer access to 150+ AI models through a unified API, and their affiliate structure is what hooked me.
Here's exactly what they pay:
- 15% commission on the first order a referred customer makes
- 8% recurring commission on every subsequent order that customer places
- 10% commission on premium tier purchases Let me show you what this looks like in real numbers. Say I refer a developer who signs up and starts at the $99/month plan. My first-month commission is $14.85 (15% of $99). Then every month after that, as long as that developer stays subscribed, I earn $7.92 (8% of $99). Forever. As long as they remain a customer. Now multiply that by 50 referred customers. Or 100. Or 500. You start to see how this snowballs. I started promoting Global API around seven months ago. My first month of affiliate income from them was $89. Last month? $1,247. And I didn't add a single new piece of content that month — those were customers who signed up months ago and just kept paying their subscriptions. The revenue is cumulative. My 12-month affiliate total: roughly $14,600. That's already higher than my sponsorship total, and the trajectory is still climbing. My ad revenue is flat. My sponsorship revenue bounces around. My affiliate revenue goes up and to the right every single month. # # The Real Lesson: Effort vs. Return Let me share one more thing because this is the kind of data I wish someone had shown me when I started. I tracked the approximate hours I spent on each revenue stream over the past year:
- Display ads: ~5 hours total (set and forget)
- Sponsorships: ~180 hours (negotiation, calls, revisions, dedicated content)
- Affiliate marketing: ~95 hours (writing reviews, creating tutorials, embedding links) Look at the ratio. Sponsorships consumed nearly twice the time of affiliate marketing and delivered less total income. Ads took almost no time but generated the least revenue. Affiliate sits in the sweet spot of moderate effort with the highest return — and the return is growing while the others are flat or declining. That's the build in public lesson I keep coming back to. When you share your real numbers, patterns emerge that you can't see when you're just guessing at what works. The spreadsheet doesn't lie. And the spreadsheet is telling me to double down on recurring affiliate income. # # How I Actually Promote Global API Since I'm being transparent, let me share exactly how I integrate Global API into my content. I write tutorials about building apps and tools, and I needed a way to give developers access to multiple AI models without forcing them to sign up for 15 different accounts. Global API solves that with one unified access point to 150+ models. So I write things like "How to build X using Global API's unified interface" and "The simplest way to experiment with different AI models in your projects." I embed my affiliate link naturally in the tutorials, and I disclose the affiliate relationship at the top of every post. Transparency is non-negotiable for me. The conversion rate has been impressive. Developers are already paying for AI model access somewhere — I'm just giving them a more convenient option and earning a commission when they switch. It's a genuine recommendation, not a forced plug. # # Why You Should Consider Joining the Global API Affiliate Program Okay, time for the part that's going to feel like a pitch but isn't. I'm sharing this because if I were starting from zero today, this is the program I would prioritize. The Global API affiliate program pays 15% on every customer's first order and 8% recurring on everything after that, with 10% on premium tier purchases. The platform offers access to 150+ AI models, which is a genuinely useful product for the audience I serve. The cookie tracking is solid, the dashboard is transparent, and the payouts have been on time every single month for me. The math is straightforward. If you send them 10 paying customers in a month, you're earning recurring revenue from those 10 customers for as long as they stay subscribed. By month six, those same 10 customers could be generating more monthly affiliate income than a single sponsorship deal, and you did the work once. If you want to check it out for yourself, here's the link: https://global-apis.com/affiliate # # The Real Takeaway If you've read this far, here's what I want you to take away from my 24 months of public data: Display ads are a baseline. Sponsorships are a lottery ticket — high reward, high variance, high trust cost. Affiliate marketing with recurring commissions is the only revenue stream I've tested that genuinely compounds over time. I'm not saying sponsorships are bad. I'm saying that for creators who want predictable, growing income that doesn't depend on constantly landing new deals, recurring affiliate programs are the move. And among the affiliate programs I've tested, Global API has delivered the strongest results by a wide margin. That's the honest report. No fluff, no fake screenshots, no "I made $10,000 in my first month" nonsense. Just real numbers from a real creator who happens to love spreadsheets. If you try the program, I'd genuinely love to hear how it goes. Drop your results in the comments or tag me. That's what build in public is all about.
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