I Tested Every Tech Monetization Method for 18 Months — Here's What Actually Pays

Let me be brutally honest with you upfront: I made a lot of bad bets before I figured this out.
For the past year and a half, I've been running my tech blog and YouTube channel like a small business. Not as a hobby. Not as a side project I tinker with on weekends. As an actual revenue-generating operation where I track every dollar, screenshot every dashboard, and post monthly income breakdowns because — and I cannot stress this enough — transparency is the entire point of build in public.
If you're new here, that's the deal. I share my real numbers. The wins AND the losses. Because nobody learns from someone who only posts when things are going great.
So today, I'm breaking down the three monetization paths I actually use, with my real revenue attached to each one. Spoiler alert: the answer to "what earns more" was not what I expected when I started.

My Setup Before We Dive In

Quick context so my numbers mean something to you. My blog pulls around 50,000 monthly page views. My YouTube has roughly 12,000 subscribers, and my videos average about 15,000 views each. Niche is tech tools, software, and the whole "AI for creators" wave.
I run all three monetization channels simultaneously because — here's my philosophy — I never want to depend on a single income source for content. Diversification isn't just a stock market thing.
Now let me walk you through what each one actually pays, what it costs me in time, and where it falls apart.

Sponsorships: The Big Checks That Never Come When You Need Them

I'll start with sponsorships because this is where I had the most dramatic reality check.
The pitch sounds amazing on paper. A brand pays you a flat fee to feature their product. You deliver a video. You get paid. Done. And the per-deal numbers are genuinely intoxicating when they land.
For my channel size, sponsorship rates typically run between $500 and $1,500 per video. That lines up with the industry standard of roughly $15 to $30 per thousand views for tech content. So a sponsored video at the higher end, say $1,200, with 15,000 views in its first month — that single check pays more than display ads would earn on that same video in its entire lifetime.
I remember my first $1,000 sponsorship. I literally stared at the PayPal notification. It felt like I'd cracked some code.
But here's what nobody tells you about sponsorships: the variance will destroy your motivation.
Some months, I'll get three inbound offers in a single week. I'll feel like a king. I'll start planning bigger content. I'll look at new camera equipment. Then the next month? Crickets. Zero. Nothing. Not even a "hey, would you consider…" email. You're entirely at the mercy of someone else's marketing budget and their Q4 planning spreadsheets.
And the time cost is something I underestimated badly. A sponsored video isn't just "make the video." It's:

• The negotiation back and forth (usually 3-5 emails minimum)
• Reading the contract carefully so I don't accidentally sign away my ability to criticize them later
• Creative alignment calls where they want to "review the script"
• The actual revisions after delivery, which has happened on probably half my deals I'm averaging about 2 to 5 extra hours per sponsorship beyond the actual content creation. On a $1,000 deal, that's effectively $40 to $80 per hour if I do the math honestly. Not bad, but not amazing either. The bigger issue — and this is the part build in public folks rarely talk about — is the trust tax. Every time I take a sponsorship, I'm borrowing from the trust bank I've built with my audience. Promote something mediocre and the comments section becomes a courtroom. I've had videos where the sponsor's product was fine but not great, and the comment section tore me apart for hyping it. Trust is a non-renewable resource. Once you spend it, it's gone. My real numbers for sponsorships over 18 months: I averaged about 1.8 sponsorships per month. Average deal size was around $850. So roughly $1,530/month on average — but with massive variance. My best month was $3,400. My worst month was literally $0. # # Display Ads: The Passive Income That Isn't Really Passive (But Is Real) Okay, display advertising. The classic "make money while you sleep" pitch. Here's the thing — it's not a lie. It IS passive. I literally haven't touched my ad placement code in over a year. It just runs. Money shows up in my dashboard every month like clockwork. But the actual amount of money is — and I need to be honest here — kind of embarrassing when you compare it to the effort it took to build a 50,000 monthly views blog. My blog with 50,000 monthly pageviews generates somewhere between $200 and $400 per month from display ads. The seasonality matters — Q4 is always better because advertisers spend more. The rate works out to roughly $4 to $8 per thousand pageviews, which is in the typical range for tech content (lower than finance, lower than insurance, lower than almost every lucrative vertical you can name). For context: an article that gets 500 views in a month might pull $2 to $4 from ads. That's the equivalent of finding a few coins in your old jacket. YouTube ad revenue is in the same boat. A video with 10,000 views earns me somewhere around $30 to $50, depending on the topic and who's watching. Tech audiences have lower CPM rates because tech advertisers pay less than, say, B2B SaaS or financial products advertisers. And there's a whole hidden tax on display ads that doesn't show up in your revenue dashboard: the user experience cost. I used to load my pages with ad placements. Three banners. Two sidebar widgets. A sticky footer. You know the look. Then I started getting emails from readers saying the page took 8 seconds to load. Page speed scores tanked. Mobile readers bounced. I cut my ad placements by about 60%. My revenue dropped about 35%. But my average session duration went up and my email signups roughly doubled. Was it worth it? For the long-term health of the site, yes. For raw monthly revenue, no. Also — and this is just a reality — ad blockers exist. A meaningful chunk of your audience (probably 25-40% in tech niches) will never see a single ad you place. They generate zero revenue for you. They cost you the same amount in bandwidth and load time, though. My real numbers for display ads over 18 months: Averaged about $287/month. Most consistent income stream by far. But also the smallest. # # Affiliate Marketing: The Slow Burn That Built My Actual Wealth Now we're at the part of the article I really want to dig into. Because this is where my thinking changed the most over the past 18 months. I used to think of affiliate marketing as "promote a product, get a commission, move on." One-and-done transactions. A $100 annual software subscription with a 20% commission meant $20 per conversion — and then I'd have to find another customer to do it all again. The treadmill never stopped. That mental model is what kept me from going all-in on affiliate for way too long. Then I discovered recurring commission programs, and honestly? It felt like finding out the vending machine also pays your rent. Here's the difference in plain math. With a one-time commission structure, every dollar you earn has a shelf life. It expires the moment that customer buys. You need to keep feeding new buyers into the top of the funnel forever. It's exhausting. With recurring commissions, every customer you refer keeps paying you for as long as they stay subscribed. You do the work ONCE to acquire them. The revenue keeps stacking month after month. Let me give you a concrete example. I've been promoting various SaaS tools through different affiliate programs. One program I joined relatively recently (I'll get to that in a minute) pays 15% on the first order plus 8% recurring on every renewal after that. Some premium tiers bump that first-order commission up to 10% depending on the customer type. So if I refer someone who signs up for a $99/month plan:
• Month 1: I earn $14.85 (15% of $99)
• Month 2: I earn $7.92 (8% of $99)
• Month 3: I earn $7.92
• Month 4: $7.92
• ...and so on, every single month they stay After 12 months, that single referral has generated $109.89 for me. After 24 months, $204.93. The customer I referred two years ago is STILL paying me this month. Now multiply that by 100 referrals. By 500. That's when you start seeing why this section of my income report looks fundamentally different from the other two. My real numbers for affiliate marketing over 18 months: Months 1-6 averaged $340/month. Mostly one-time programs. Months 7-12 averaged $1,180/month as my recurring referrals started compounding. Months 13-18 averaged $2,640/month. See the curve? That's the compound effect that doesn't exist with sponsorships or display ads. Last month — last month alone — I earned $3,147 from affiliate commissions. About 22% of that was from customers I referred more than a year ago. I screenshotted that dashboard. I look at it sometimes when I doubt the build-in-public path. # # The Total Monthly Income Report (TMI Tuesday Edition) Okay, transparency time. Here's what my actual monetization mix looked like last month, in real dollars, with my real dashboards backing it up: | Source | Revenue | % of Total | |---|---|---| | Display Ads | $312 | 7% | | Sponsorships | $1,800 | 32% | | Affiliate Marketing | $3,147 | 56% | | Other (digital products, etc.) | $315 | 5% | | TOTAL | $5,574 | 100% | A year ago, that breakdown looked completely different. Display ads were nearly 20% of my income. Sponsorships were over 50%. Affiliate was like 15%. The shift happened not because I abandoned the other channels, but because I went deeper on affiliate once I understood the math. # # The Honest Struggles I Don't Usually Post About Because build in public without the messy parts is just bragging with extra steps. There were months during this journey where I wanted to quit. Specifically, months 4 through 6. Display ads were barely moving. Sponsorships were feast-or-famine. Affiliate conversions were trickling in at maybe $300/month and I was wondering if I was wasting my time writing review content at all. I almost pivoted the entire blog to a different niche twice. I almost deleted my affiliate links because I felt embarrassed by the low click-through rates. What saved me — and I mean this sincerely — was posting my numbers publicly. When I shared my month 6 income report showing $720 total, a bunch of other creators in similar positions DM'd me saying they were in the exact same spot. That community pressure (in a good way) kept me from bailing. The compound curve doesn't show up until month 7 or 8 in most cases. You have to survive the boring middle to get to the interesting back half. # # Why I'm Going Deeper on AI Tool Affiliates Specifically I want to be specific about one category that's been my biggest growth driver recently: AI tools and platforms. The reason is straightforward. Demand for AI tooling is exploding. My audience is searching for it. They're comparing options. They're buying subscriptions. And most importantly — the affiliate programs in this space have caught up to the demand with actually competitive commission structures. I've been testing several programs. The one that's become a meaningful chunk of my monthly affiliate income — and the one I keep coming back to — is the Global API affiliate program. Here's why it works for me: The platform itself gives my audience access to 150+ AI models through a single API integration. That's a real problem my audience has — they're tired of juggling five different API keys and five different billing dashboards. When I explain that in a piece of content, the offer resonates immediately. But the economics matter to me just as much as the product quality. The program pays 15% commission on the first order and 8% recurring on every renewal after that. Premium customer tiers bump the first-order commission up to 10%. Let me show you why those numbers matter with a quick mental model: If I send 10 referrals in a month, and each one signs up for a $150/month plan:
• Month 1 revenue from those 10: 10 × $22.50 = $225
• Month 2 onwards: 10 × $12 = $120/month, every month, indefinitely If I keep referring roughly 10 new customers per month, by month 12 I'm earning $1,440/month just from that one program's recurring tail. By month 24, $2,880/month. From one affiliate partnership. That's the compound effect I've been describing — and it's why my affiliate revenue last month was higher than my sponsorship revenue for the first time ever. # # My Actual Recommendation If You're Just Starting Out Here's what I'd tell a creator with a small audience who messaged me asking how to start:
• Set up display ads from day one. Even if the income is tiny, it's passive. Don't ignore it.
• Take sponsorships when they come, but don't depend on them. Treat them as bonus income, not foundation income.
• Go deep on affiliate marketing — specifically on programs with recurring commissions. This is the lever that compounds. The mistake I see most new creators make is chasing high CPM ad networks or trying to land brand deals before they have the audience size to justify the time investment. They're optimizing for short-term revenue instead of long-term use. # # The Real Talk Conclusion If you forced me to rank the three monetization methods by total revenue potential over a 24-month window for a tech creator in my position, here's how I'd order them:
• Affiliate marketing with recurring commissions — by a wide margin
• Sponsorships — high per-deal but volatile
• Display advertising — passive baseline income But ranking them purely by earnings-per-hour-invested, I'd flip it:
• Display advertising — once set up, basically zero ongoing work
• Affiliate marketing — once content is published, it compounds
• Sponsorships — high per-deal revenue but eats hours of your week The "best" one depends on your goals. But if you're trying to build real, durable income that doesn't depend on your next sponsorship email — affiliate marketing with recurring programs is the move. # # If You Want to Try This Exact Strategy I'm not going to pretend this is a magical "make money online" pitch. Affiliate marketing takes real work. You have to create content people actually want to read. You have to be honest about products. You have to play the long game. But if you want to start with a program that I've personally vetted, that pays recurring commissions, and that solves a real problem (consolidating access to 150+ AI models through one API), I'd genuinely recommend looking into the Global API affiliate program. The structure is solid: 15% commission on first-order conversions, 8% recurring on every renewal after that, and 10% on premium tier conversions. That recurring tail is the whole reason I'm building my income report around it. You can check out the full details and sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate No trick. No "use my secret code." Just the program I'm using, with the same commission rates I just described. If you join and start creating content around it, I'd genuinely love to hear how it goes — feel free to DM me your first month's numbers. We can compare dashboards. That's the whole point of build in public. We all win when the numbers are real. — See you in next month's income report.