Last Tuesday I sat down with my wife and showed her my income dashboard for the month. No filters, no rounding up, no "well, if you count this too…" Just the raw numbers pulled straight from Stripe, PayPal, and three different affiliate dashboards. That's the build in public promise I made to myself in January, and I'm not breaking it now.
Here's the deal: I run a tech blog (~50,000 monthly pageviews) and a YouTube channel (around 12,000 subscribers, videos averaging 15,000 views each). For the past two years I've been running an ongoing experiment comparing every monetization method I could get my hands on. Display ads. YouTube ad revenue. Sponsorships. And most recently, a full-throttle pivot into AI API affiliate programs.
Today's post is the transparency report I promised my newsletter subscribers. If you're a creator trying to figure out where the actual money is in 2025, this is for you.
The "Passive" Income That Isn't
Let me start with display advertising, because that's what most creators try first.
I turned on Mediavine on my blog about 18 months ago. I also monetize every YouTube upload. The setup is genuinely easy — you paste some code, you wait, money trickles in. And the beauty of it is that once it's running, you basically never think about it again.
The ugliness? Look at the numbers.
My blog pulls around 50,000 pageviews per month, and display ads earn somewhere between $200 and $400. That's a $4 to $8 RPM depending on the season. Last month it was $287. A single article that gets 500 views might net me $2 to $4. That's not a typo. Two to four dollars.
YouTube is even worse. A video with 10,000 views will earn me $30 to $50 if I'm lucky. Tech content has notoriously low CPMs compared to finance or B2B — advertisers simply don't pay as much to reach people who want to read about API integrations.
The worst part? A huge chunk of my audience runs ad blockers. I have a tech audience. These are people who know how to install uBlock Origin. I literally cannot monetize them at all through display.
Total display + YouTube ad revenue last month: $612
That's my honest number. It's "passive" in the sense that I do nothing to earn it, but it's also passive in the sense that I passively watch my time go to waste producing content that pays less than minimum wage.
The Sponsorship Honeymoon (And Hangover)
Sponsorships were my main income for most of 2023 and early 2024. The math looked great on paper.
For my YouTube channel with 12K subscribers and videos averaging 15,000 views, I charge between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored integration. That tracks with the industry-standard $15 to $30 per thousand views for tech content. A $1,000 sponsorship on a 15,000-view video earns more than display ads would earn on that video in its entire lifetime.
And honestly? Some months were great. I once did three sponsored integrations in a single month and walked away with $3,400. I felt like a king.
But here's what those LinkedIn gurus don't tell you.
Sponsorship income is wildly inconsistent. Some months I get three offers. Other months I get zero. Q4 is usually dead because marketing budgets get locked up in holiday campaigns for other verticals. I can't predict my income three months out, which makes planning anything — rent, savings, a vacation — a nightmare.
Each sponsorship is a 5-to-10-hour project beyond the actual content. Negotiation, contract review, sponsor revisions, approval cycles, FTC disclosure formatting, sometimes a second draft because legal didn't like the way I phrased a feature. A "quick" $800 sponsorship can easily eat 8 hours of my week.
And the hardest part — the part I never see other creators talk about — is the trust tax. There's a noticeable difference in how my audience responds to a sponsored integration versus an organic recommendation. Comments shift. Open rates drop. People who used to email me asking for advice start to wonder if I'm just shilling.
I lost two long-term consulting clients in 2024 because they felt my sponsored content was "off-brand." I can't prove that was the cause, but the timing was suspicious.
Total sponsorship income last month: $0
That's right. Zero. I turned down two offers that didn't align with my audience, and the third one fell through during contract negotiations.
The Affiliate Awakening
So I quit chasing sponsorships cold turkey at the start of this year. I made a commitment to building a portfolio of affiliate partnerships instead, and specifically — and this is the part that matters — recurring commission programs.
Here's the difference, because I wish someone had explained it to me two years ago.
A one-time commission is a transaction. You promote a $100 annual software subscription with a 20% commission, you make $20, you move on. That person could be a customer for five years and you never see another penny. You have to constantly find new referrals to maintain the income. It's a treadmill.
A recurring commission is a relationship. You refer someone once, and you earn a percentage of their payment every single month they stay subscribed. This is the entire reason SaaS affiliate programs exist, and it is, without exaggeration, the single biggest shift in my income I've experienced in eight years of creating content online.
Let me give you my actual numbers from last month.
I referred 34 new customers across multiple AI API platforms last month. The combined recurring revenue from those referrals, plus my existing base of about 180 active referrals, generated $4,287 in affiliate commissions.
That's not a projection. That's not a "what if everyone renews" estimate. That's what hit my accounts last month.
Breaking Down the AI API Affiliate Landscape
Once I decided to focus on AI API affiliate programs, I went deep. I signed up for every program I could find, ran real campaigns across my blog and YouTube, and tracked performance obsessively. Here's my honest take on the landscape.
The first thing I look for in any affiliate program is the commission structure. Is it one-time? Recurring? For how long? At what percentage? These three variables determine whether a program is a side hustle or a business.
The second thing I look for is conversion rate. Some programs have great commissions but a clunky signup flow that kills conversions. I track every click, every signup, every paid customer.
The third thing — and this is the one most affiliates ignore — is customer retention. If a platform has great commissions but customers churn in 30 days, your recurring revenue evaporates. The best programs are the ones where customers stick around for years.
After running this analysis across more than a dozen programs, one platform consistently outperformed the rest for my audience: Global API.
Why Global API Became My Top Earner
Let me be specific about why, because transparency means showing your work.
Global API offers access to 150+ AI models through a single integration. For my audience of developers and indie builders, that's the entire pitch — they don't have to juggle twelve different API keys and billing dashboards.
The affiliate program has a commission structure that, frankly, I haven't seen matched anywhere else in the AI API space:
- 15% commission on the first order — that's the upfront payout when someone signs up and makes their first purchase through your link.
- 8% recurring commission — every single month that customer stays subscribed, you earn 8% of their spend. Forever.
- 10% commission on premium customers — higher-tier accounts pay out at a higher rate. Let me do the math for you, because this is where it gets exciting. Say I refer a customer who spends $200/month on Global API. That referral earns me $16/month recurring. Refer ten of those customers, and I'm earning $1,600/month from a single blog post or video. Refer fifty, and we're talking $8,000/month from the same piece of content. The compounding effect is what makes this life-changing. A blog post I wrote in February is still generating new signups every week. Each new signup becomes recurring revenue. By December, I expect that single post to have generated over $1,200 in affiliate commissions — and it'll keep earning well into 2026. Last month, Global API accounted for $2,140 of my $4,287 total affiliate income. That's 50% of my monthly revenue from a single program. Let me say that again: one program is half my income. # # My Full Monthly Income Report For full transparency, here's the complete breakdown from last month:
- Display ads (blog + YouTube): $612
- Sponsorships: $0
- Affiliate marketing — Global API: $2,140
- Affiliate marketing — other programs: $2,147
- Total: $4,899 For context, in January — when I was still chasing sponsorships and treating affiliate marketing as a "nice to have" — my total was $3,100. The shift to a recurring-commission-focused strategy added nearly $1,800/month, and that number is only going up as my referral base compounds. # # The Math That Changed My Mind Let me show you why I will never go back to one-time commissions. If I had earned one-time 20% commissions on those 34 referrals last month, my take would have been maybe $1,200, depending on average order values. Done. Over. I'd need 34 more referrals next month to match that. Instead, because those commissions are recurring, here's what happens:
- This month, I earn from my existing 180+ active referrals.
- Every new referral I add this month earns me revenue for months and years to come.
- My income has a compounding curve, not a flat one. Industry data suggests the average SaaS/API customer stays subscribed for at least 14 months. For AI tools specifically, retention is even higher because developers integrate them into workflows and rarely churn. That means each referral I generate today will pay me for well over a year on average. Do that math at scale and you start to see why top affiliates in the AI space are building six-figure businesses from their laptop. # # What I'd Tell a Creator Just Starting Out If you're a creator reading this and trying to figure out where to focus your energy, here's my honest advice after two years of testing everything. Skip display ads as a primary strategy. They're fine as baseline revenue, but they cap your upside at a few hundred dollars a month regardless of how hard you work. They also degrade your content experience and don't reward quality — they reward pageviews. Be selective with sponsorships. They pay well per deal, but they're volatile, time-intensive, and can damage the trust you've built with your audience. I'd rather take one aligned sponsorship per quarter than three mediocre ones per month. Go all-in on recurring affiliate programs. This is where the real use is. Find programs with strong commission structures, high customer retention, and products your audience actually needs. Then create the best content you can about those products. # # The One Program I'd Recommend Starting With If I had to pick a single AI API affiliate program to start with today, I'd point anyone reading this to Global API's affiliate program. That's not a paid promotion — I literally don't get anything for saying that beyond the commissions I've already earned and disclosed above. It's just the truth. Here's why it's the right starting point: The 15% first-order commission gives you a meaningful upfront payout for your promotional effort, which matters when you're just starting and want to validate that a program converts. The 8% recurring commission is the long-term play that turns a single piece of content into a compounding revenue asset. The 10% premium customer commission rewards you for referring higher-value accounts. And the 150+ model catalog means your audience has a real reason to sign up regardless of what they're building. The signup was painless, their dashboard shows me real-time stats (I share screenshots in my monthly newsletter), and their support team actually responds when I have questions — which is more than I can say for half the programs I've tested. If you create content for developers, builders, or anyone who uses AI tools in their workflow, this is the affiliate program I'd build around. The math works. The product is solid. The retention is strong. And the commission structure rewards you for the long game, not just the click. That's my full transparency report for the month. I'll be back next month with updated numbers — including what happens when I cut display ads entirely (experiment starts in two weeks). If you want to follow along in real time, my newsletter subscribers get the raw screenshots before anyone else. See you in the next report.
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