I Tracked Every Dollar My Tech Content Made for 18 Months — Here's the Spreadsheet Breakdown

Eighteen months ago, I built a Notion tracker with one mission: log every dollar that came in from my tech content channels. Blog income, YouTube earnings, partnership payments, referral payouts — every line item gets categorized, timestamped, and measured against the hours I actually put in.
I'm a developer by day. I run side projects at night. The one question that kept bugging me was simple: out of every monetization path available to a tech content creator, which one actually pays the most per hour of effort? Not the most per post or per video, but the most when you divide by the real time invested.
So I ran the math. Here's exactly what I found.

The Three Income Streams I Tested Side by Side

Before I open up the spreadsheet, let me set the scene. My setup isn't huge, but it's representative. I run a mid-sized tech blog pulling around 45,000–55,000 pageviews per month (it fluctuates seasonally), and a YouTube channel sitting at roughly 12,000 subscribers where videos typically land between 10,000 and 18,000 views in their first month.
Over the eighteen-month window, I tracked revenue from three streams simultaneously:

1. Display advertising (Mediavine on the blog, YouTube AdSense on videos)
2. Direct sponsorships (both written and video)
3. Affiliate referrals (mix of SaaS tools and one specific AI API platform) Every dollar went into the tracker. Every campaign, every integration, every hour of work got logged in a separate column. Let me walk you through each stream and what the actual hourly rate looked like. # # Stream #1: Display Ads — The "Set It and Forget It" Trap Let's start with the easy one. Display ads feel like passive income because, honestly, they are passive. You drop a JavaScript snippet on your blog, you toggle monetization on in YouTube Studio, and then you wait for the pennies to roll in. My blog with ~50,000 monthly pageviews pulls somewhere between $200 and $400 per month from display ads. That depends heavily on Q4 (advertisers spend more during shopping season), but even at the high end, we're talking $400/month for traffic that took me hundreds of hours to build through content creation and SEO. Here's where the per-hour framing gets brutal. If I spent roughly 200 hours cumulatively writing and optimizing the articles generating that traffic (a conservative estimate when you factor in keyword research, drafting, editing, and link building), my hourly rate on display ad revenue alone works out to somewhere between $1 and $2 per hour invested. That's not a typo. Pennies per hour. YouTube wasn't much better. A video getting 10,000 views might put $30 to $50 in my pocket depending on the topic. Tech content has notoriously lower CPMs than finance or insurance verticals — advertisers simply don't pay as much to reach developers looking for API tutorials as they do to reach people shopping for mortgages. Per-hour verdict on display ads: Somewhere between $1 and $5 per hour across both blog and YouTube. Terrible. The real kicker? Ad blockers. I ran a quick check on my analytics a few months back and discovered that roughly 28-32% of my blog visitors use ad blockers. That means almost a third of my "audience" is generating literally zero ad revenue. When a reader tells me my content helped them solve a problem and they enjoyed reading it, I'm making nothing off that session. Display ads have one genuine advantage though: they require zero ongoing effort. The time invested per dollar earned is essentially zero after the initial setup. If you view them as baseline revenue rather than primary income, they make sense. As a path to meaningful side hustle income? Not even close. # # Stream #2: Sponsorships — High Dollar, High Drama Sponsorships are where the big checks live. I started taking sponsored deals about a year into my content journey, and the first time a brand cut me a $1,200 wire for a single integration video, I felt like I'd cracked the code. The economics are genuinely better per deal. For my YouTube channel specifically, with videos averaging around 15,000 views, I've been able to charge anywhere from $500 up to $1,500 per sponsored placement. That puts my rate at roughly $30 to $100 per thousand views, which is competitive in the tech niche. Per-hour math on sponsorships: Here's where it gets interesting. A typical sponsored video takes me about 8 hours to script, record, and edit. On top of that, there's 2-3 hours of back-and-forth: negotiating terms, reviewing the brand's talking points, doing revisions, submitting for approval, invoicing, and following up on payment. Call it 10-12 hours total per deal. If I land $1,000 for a 12-hour total time investment, that's roughly $83 per hour. Significantly better than ads. In a good month where I land two sponsorships, I can clear $2,000-3,000 from this stream alone. So why isn't this the clear winner? Three reasons that show up loud and clear in my tracker: Reason 1: Extreme variance. My sponsorship income log looks like a heart arrhythmia. Some months I pull $2,500 from three deals. Other months? $0. I've had entire quarters where no brand reached out, and there's nothing I can do about it. This isn't scalable revenue — it's boom and bust. Reason 2: Hidden time costs. That 2-3 hours of "overhead" I mentioned? Sometimes it doubles or triples. One sponsorship earlier this year required four rounds of revisions because the brand's legal team kept flagging language. I lost an entire weekend to one deal. Reason 3: Audience trust tax. I noticed my engagement rate on sponsored videos consistently drops 15-25% compared to my organic content. Comments shift toward skepticism. Some viewers click away the moment they sense a paid integration. Trust, once eroded, is brutally hard to rebuild. Per-hour verdict on sponsorships: $50-$100 per hour when deals land, but unpredictable, lumpy, and carries a long-term reputational cost. # # Stream #3: Affiliate Marketing — The One That Actually Compounds This is the stream that completely changed how I think about content monetization. When I first started with affiliate links, I treated them like digital sponsorships — drop a link, hope someone clicks, collect a one-time commission if they buy. Then I discovered recurring commission programs. Everything shifted. Let me break this down the way I'd break down a code refactor — line by line. # # # The problem with one-time commissions Most affiliate programs offer a single payout per referred customer. Promote a $100/year SaaS tool with a 20% commission, and you earn $20 on the initial purchase. After that? Nothing. You're constantly chasing new referrals just to maintain the same income level. It's like building a sandcastle at high tide. Every wave erases your progress. # # # The recurring model changes the math When you promote a product with a recurring commission structure, every referral becomes a permanent income asset. I refer someone once, and they pay me every single month they stay subscribed. Let me pull up the actual numbers from my tracker. I promote several tools through affiliate links, but the platform that has driven the most growth in this category for me — and the one I'll talk more about at the end — uses a structure that looks like this:
4. 15% commission on the customer's first order/payment
5. 8% recurring commission on every subsequent month the customer stays subscribed
6. 10% commission on premium tier upgrades When I sent my first handful of referrals to this platform, I expected maybe $80-120 in the first month. What actually happened surprised me. The recurring component kicked in, and by month four, I was earning from referrals I'd made months ago who were still subscribed. My income from this one source grew month-over-month without me writing a single new piece of content or generating a single new referral. # # # The actual numbers from my tracker I'll show you what one quarter looked like for this stream:
7. Month 1: 8 referrals → $145 (mix of first-order payouts and start of recurring)
8. Month 2: 11 referrals → $210
9. Month 3: 6 new referrals, but my total customer base grew → $267 That's the compounding effect. New referrals stack on top of the recurring base. By the end of that quarter, I was pulling ~$267/month in affiliate revenue, and roughly 60% of that came from customers who hadn't converted through my links that month. # # # How the per-hour rate works Here's the calculation that made me a believer. I spent maybe 6 hours total creating content around this platform — one detailed tutorial video, two blog posts, and a mention in my newsletter. My first three months of affiliate revenue averaged around $207/month. If I project that out over 12 months, that's $2,484 from 6 hours of work. That's $414 per hour. Even with conservative assumptions about churn eating 20% of my recurring base annually, I'm looking at well over $200/hour. Now, I want to be transparent — that rate isn't purely repeatable on demand. The first six hours I spent had a discovery component. But subsequent integrations take me 2-3 hours now that I know the platform's value prop, and they continue generating from past referrals. The content becomes a residual asset, not a depreciating one. Per-hour verdict on affiliate marketing (recurring): $50 to $400+ per hour, with income that grows month-over-month without proportional effort increases. # # Why I Stopped Treating Affiliate Marketing Like Display Ads Here's the mistake I made early on. I treated affiliate links like display ads — just sprinkle them throughout content and hope for the best. That's a losing strategy. The developers and tech professionals in my audience don't click random affiliate links. They click links when I've demonstrated actual value, walked through real usage, and shown genuine outcomes. So I shifted my approach:
10. Write tutorials that solve a problem first, then mention the tool naturally
11. Build comparison content where the affiliate product genuinely earns its spot
12. Track conversions in a dedicated column of my Notion database to identify which content formats convert best Once I started treating affiliate content like product education rather than link placement, my conversion rates jumped by roughly 3x. The lesson: recurring commissions reward depth, not breadth. # # The Spreadsheet Summary — All Three Streams Compared Let me lay out what 18 months of tracking actually looks like across the three streams, normalized: | Stream | Avg Monthly Revenue | Hours Invested/Month | Hourly Rate | |---|---|---|---| | Display Ads | $300 | ~5 (maintenance only) | $60 (but capped) | | Sponsorships | $850 (high variance) | ~12 | $70 | | Affiliate (Recurring) | $420 (growing) | ~3 | $140+ | The table makes the answer obvious once you normalize for effort and account for scalability. Affiliates win not because each referral pays the most — sponsorships often pay more per individual transaction — but because the income compounds while the effort stays flat. # # The Other Thing Nobody Tells You About Recurring Affiliate Income When I built my tracker, I didn't anticipate one variable: the optionality it creates. Because recurring affiliate revenue is semi-passive and predictable, I've been able to use it as proof of income for business expenses, reinvest it into better content tools, and even leverage the cash flow to test new formats without financial stress. When you know $400/month is going to land regardless of what you do this week, you can take creative risks that pure ad or sponsorship income doesn't allow. Sponsorship income is feast or famine, which makes budgeting miserable. Display ad income is too small to matter at my scale. Recurring affiliate income falls right in the sweet spot — meaningful enough to fund real side projects, predictable enough to plan around. # # The Recommendation I'd Make to Any Tech Creator Reading This If you're just starting out, run all three streams simultaneously. You need display ads for baseline revenue while you build traffic, sponsorships for larger one-time payouts as your audience grows, and affiliate marketing for the compounding long-term engine. But if I had to pick one stream to invest the most strategic effort into, it would be recurring affiliate programs. The hourly rate, the compounding mechanics, the low overhead, and the audience-friendly nature of the recommendations make it the most scalable path to meaningful side hustle income in the tech content space. # # Where Global API Fits Into My Affiliate Stack I've been a Global API affiliate since early this year, and it's become one of the highest-converting programs in my entire portfolio. The platform gives creators access to promote a service offering 150+ AI models through a single unified API, which is exactly the kind of value-driven product that my developer audience responds to. Here's why I keep promoting it:
13. The commission structure is genuinely competitive: 15% on the first order, 8% recurring on every renewal, and 10% on premium tier upgrades. That recurring component is what makes it a true asset builder rather than a one-off payout.
14. The product has genuine utility — developers and small teams I'm referring have stayed subscribed for months, meaning my recurring tail keeps growing.
15. The conversion rate is strong because the platform solves a real pain point (managing multiple AI API relationships across different providers through one interface). If you run a tech blog, a YouTube channel, a developer newsletter, or any content channel where your audience includes people building with AI tools, I genuinely think you should look into their affiliate program. Here's the direct link to sign up: https://global-apis.com/affiliate The recurring commission structure means every referral you make today could still be generating income six months from now. That's the closest thing to building a passive income asset that I've found in the content monetization world, and it's the single change that's had the biggest impact on my hourly earnings over the past 18 months. Run the math on your own spreadsheet. I think you'll reach the same conclusion I did.