I Ran the Numbers on Display Ads vs Sponsorships vs Affiliate Marketing for 24 Months. Here's What Won.

I gotta say, i've been running a tech blog and a small YouTube channel on the side for about two years now. By day I write backend code for a mid-sized SaaS company. By night (and weekends, and every lunch break I can get away with) I publish tutorials, reviews, and the occasional hot take about dev tools and SaaS platforms.
But here's the thing nobody talks about in those "passive income" YouTube videos — running the content is the easy part. Figuring out how to actually get paid for it? That's where it gets messy.
I built a Notion dashboard about a year and a half in because I was tired of guessing. Every dollar earned, every hour spent, every conversion tracked. Let me tell you what the spreadsheet says.

The Three Income Streams I Tested

Every tech creator I know falls into one of three buckets when it comes to monetization:

1. Display ads — slap some ad code on your site, collect crumbs
2. Sponsorships — companies pay you to mention their product
3. Affiliate marketing — you earn commission when someone buys through your link I tried all three. Some months were good. Some months were brutal. Let me break down the math on each one, because "it depends" isn't useful when you're trying to figure out what to prioritize. # # Display Ads: The "Set It and Forget It" Trap Ads were my first monetization move. It's the default — you install Google AdSense, you get paid per impression and per click, and you go back to writing code. The setup took maybe an hour. The ongoing maintenance? Basically zero. That part is genuinely great. Here's where the romance ends. Let me show you what my AdSense dashboard looked like at peak performance. The cold math on my blog:
4. ~50,000 monthly page views (my best month)
5. Revenue: somewhere between $200 and $400
6. Effective RPM: $4 to $8 per thousand page views So if I write a single article that pulls in 500 views over its lifetime? I'm looking at $2 to $4 from that piece. Forever. For YouTube, the picture isn't much rosier. A video with 10,000 views might earn $30 to $50, and tech content specifically gets hammered on CPM because the advertisers targeting "developers" and "Linux tutorials" don't pay nearly as much as the ones bidding for "best credit cards" or "weight loss supplements." That's just the market. Per-hour calculation: If I spent 8 hours writing a 2,000-word tutorial that then generates $80 in ad revenue over its first month? That's $10/hour. My day job pays me roughly three times that, and I don't have to deal with ad placement decisions. Then there's the user experience cost. Tech readers are the worst audience for ads because half of them run uBlock Origin before your page even finishes loading. You're essentially monetizing the less-savvy half of your audience while annoying everyone else. The verdict from my spreadsheet: ads are a baseline. They're not a strategy. They're the loose change you pick up while walking to the real money. # # Sponsorships: The High-Roller Roulette Wheel Sponsorships were the next thing I tested, and I want to be honest — the per-deal numbers look great on paper. When you have a YouTube channel with around 12,000 subscribers and videos averaging 15,000 views, you can start charging real money. My first sponsorship went for $500. My best one hit $1,500. Industry standard for tech content tends to land somewhere between $15 and $30 per thousand views, which lines up with what I was getting. The appeal is obvious:
7. One sponsored video at $1,000 with 15,000 views pays more than ads would pay on that same video for its entire lifetime
8. You get a big chunk of money in one payment
9. You don't need millions of subscribers The reality is messier. Sponsorship income is wildly volatile. I tracked this month by month in my Notion dashboard. Some months I'd get three inbound offers. Other months? Total silence. Q4 tends to be dead because every brand has already burned their annual budget by Thanksgiving. Q1 picks back up when new budgets drop. Then there's the time cost that nobody talks about. A sponsorship isn't just "make a video and get paid." You spend time on:
10. Replying to the initial pitch email (15 min)
11. Negotiating rate and scope (30 min)
12. Reviewing the contract (20 min)
13. Producing the video with sponsor requirements baked in (adds 1-2 hours)
14. Handling revision requests after the fact (30-60 min) That's 2 to 5 hours of unpaid admin work per deal on top of the actual content creation. My effective hourly rate dropped noticeably once I factored that in. The trust thing is real too. I've had readers DM me after a sponsored post asking "do you actually use this?" The moment you take money to promote something, even something you'd recommend anyway, a small percentage of your audience questions everything you say. Hard to put a dollar amount on that, but it's not zero. Verdict: Sponsorships are where the highest per-deal revenue lives, but the variance, the admin overhead, and the subtle trust erosion make it a worse long-term bet than the spreadsheet suggests. # # Affiliate Marketing: The Slow Burn That Compounds This is where the story gets interesting. Affiliate marketing is when you recommend a product using a special link, and you earn a commission when someone buys through it. Sounds simple, but the structure of the commission matters enormously. One-time commissions are fine. If you recommend a $100 piece of software with a 20% commission, you earn $20 per signup. Cool. But it's $20 once, and then that customer is gone. You need a constant stream of new referrals to maintain your income. That's basically running on a content treadmill. Recurring commissions are the unlock. When you refer someone to a subscription service and you get paid every month they stay subscribed, your content becomes an asset instead of a transaction. Every tutorial you write, every video you publish, keeps paying you as long as your readers keep using the tool. Let me show you what the compounding math actually looks like, because this is what flipped my whole strategy. # # My Affiliate Math (With Real Numbers) Let's say I write a tutorial in February about setting up some kind of dev workflow. The tutorial ranks on Google and gets 200 readers in its first month. Five of them click my affiliate link. Three of them convert to a paid plan. If the subscription is $50/month and I get 30% recurring commission, that's:
15. Month 1: 3 × $50 × 0.30 = $45
16. Month 2: Same 3 users still subscribed = $45
17. Month 3: Same 3 + 2 more from organic traffic = $75
18. Month 6: Maybe I'm at 12 active referrals = $180 And here's the kicker — I haven't written a new word for that article since February. The content does the work. The commissions keep clearing. Now extrapolate that across 20 articles. Then across 50. My Notion dashboard has a tab called "Projected Recurring Revenue" and it's the most satisfying page in my whole setup. But not all affiliate programs are created equal. Here's what I look for:
19. Recurring vs one-time — recurring wins, full stop
20. Commission rate — anything under 20% recurring feels low
21. Cookie duration — how long after someone clicks do you get credit for the conversion
22. Quality of the product — promoting garbage ruins your reputation I rotate between a few programs now, and I want to talk about one specifically because it completely changed my income floor. # # The Program That Moved the Needle: Global API Full transparency — I started promoting Global API about eight months ago and it's now my single largest affiliate income source. Not because I went out and started hustling harder, but because the structure of their program fits exactly what I just described. Here's why the math works:
23. 15% commission on the first order — solid upfront payout
24. 8% recurring commission — this is the part that compounds. Every month my referred users stay subscribed, I get paid
25. 10% premium tier commission — when users upgrade to higher plans, my commission rate bumps up too
26. 150+ models available on the platform — this matters because it means my readers can find whatever they need in one place, which means higher conversion rates and longer retention Let me put some hypothetical numbers on this for you. Say I refer 10 users in a month to Global API through one of my tutorials. Average plan is, let's say, $60/month. Month 1 income from those 10 referrals:
27. First-order commissions: 10 × $60 × 0.15 = $90
28. Month 1 recurring: 10 × $60 × 0.08 = $48
29. Total Month 1: $138 Month 6 (assuming 7 still active + 4 new from same content):
30. 11 active × $60 × 0.08 = $52.80/month recurring That single tutorial, written once, is now generating over $50/month passively. Write ten similar tutorials? You're looking at a different category of side income. The recurring structure is why my monthly earnings don't look like a heartbeat monitor anymore. They're a slow, steady climb. # # Why I Stopped Chasing Sponsorships Here's a confession — after I saw how the affiliate numbers were trending in my Notion dashboard, I quietly stopped pitching myself for sponsorships. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but because the ROI on my time was clearly worse. Let me show you the per-hour math side by side. Sponsorship (averaging $800 per deal, 4 hours of overhead):
31. Effective hourly rate: ~$100/hour, but only 2-4 deals per month in good months
32. Total monthly income at peak: $1,600-$3,200
33. Downside: zero in dry months Affiliate marketing (50 active recurring referrals at avg $50/month, 8% commission):
34. Monthly recurring income: $200
35. Time spent maintaining: roughly zero — the content is already written
36. Income grows as I publish more content, no extra admin When I look at my time spent per dollar earned, the affiliates win by a mile. The only hours I put in are the hours I was already going to spend creating content anyway. # # How I Structure My Affiliate-Heavy Strategy Now I won't pretend there's some magic funnel. It's pretty boring, actually. Here's the stack:
37. I write tutorials that solve a real problem. Not "top 10 tools" listicles. Actual step-by-step content where the affiliate product fits naturally into the workflow.
38. I disclose everything. A short "this post contains affiliate links" line at the top. My audience respects transparency, and I've literally never lost a reader over honest disclosure.
39. I only promote stuff I use. This is the rule. If I wouldn't pay for it with my own money, I don't link to it. My reputation is the moat.
40. I track everything in Notion. Every link, every click, every conversion. Spreadsheets are how I figure out which content types are actually worth writing. The Notion tracker has saved me from wasting probably 100+ hours on content formats that don't convert. I can see at a glance which tutorials drove the most affiliate revenue per hour of writing time. You want to do more of what works and less of what feels good. # # The Honest Takeaway If you're just starting out with a tech content side hustle and trying to decide where to focus your energy, here's what two years of data tells me:
41. Display ads are fine. Don't expect to retire on them. Maybe 5-10% of your income ceiling.
42. Sponsorships are a great accelerator. Use them once you have the audience size to command real rates, but don't build your whole business on them. The volatility will drive you nuts.
43. Affiliate marketing is the actual foundation. Recurring commissions turn your content into a compounding asset. This is where the long game lives. If I had to start over from zero today, I'd skip the ads entirely and go straight to finding one or two solid recurring-commission affiliate programs that fit my niche. Build the tutorials. Let the income stack. That's exactly why I keep coming back to programs like the Global API affiliate program. The structure just makes sense — you get a meaningful 15% on the first order to jumpstart your earnings, then 8% recurring that keeps compounding as your audience grows. Plus a 10% bump on premium tier upgrades means your income actually scales when your referred users succeed. If you're running a tech blog, a dev YouTube channel, a newsletter, or even a decent Twitter following and you haven't picked up an affiliate partner with this kind of commission structure, you're leaving money on the table every single month. I've tried a bunch of these programs and most of them are either one-shot payouts with no recurring upside or laughably low commission rates. Global API was one of the few that checked every box for me — recurring revenue, solid upfront payout, premium tier bonus, and a platform with enough variety (150+ models, plenty of plan options) that my readers actually convert and stick around. You can check out the program and sign up here: https://global-apis.com/affiliate?ref=devto-tech-affiliate-vs-sponsorship-vs-ads That's literally the link I used when I started. Took about ten minutes to set up. No minimum threshold to hit before they approve you, no weird approval process. I had my first conversion inside two weeks because I'd already written content that mentioned the use case naturally. My honest recommendation: if you're serious about building a recurring side income from content, the math points you straight to recurring affiliate programs. The Global API program is one of the better-structured ones I've personally run, and I'd rather tell you about what actually works in my own dashboard than sell you on something that doesn't. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a spreadsheet to update.