I run four projects. None of them are huge. Together they pull in roughly $11k MRR, give or take a bad week when Stripe decides to have a hiccup or a customer churns out of nowhere. I mention this not to flex — honestly, $11k isn't life-changing money in 2025 — but to set context, because every dollar in my business comes from one of three monetization models, and I have opinions about all of them.
This is the breakdown of what's actually working, what's been a waste of my time, and what I'd tell a fellow indie maker who is trying to figure out how to turn content into recurring revenue without selling their soul.
My Stack at a Glance
Before I get into the weeds, here's what my revenue mix looked like last quarter:
- Sponsorships: ~22% of content income
- Display ads: ~9% of content income
- Affiliate income: ~69% of content income That affiliate number surprises most people. Two years ago I would have predicted sponsorships would dominate. I was wrong. Let me explain why. # # Sponsorships: Great Per Deal, Brutal on Consistency Sponsorships were my first "real" content income. I'll never forget the first time a SaaS company slid into my DMs with an offer for a dedicated integration video on my YouTube channel. I had around 8,000 subs at the time. My hands were literally shaking opening that email. The check cleared. I felt like a king. Then the next month, nothing. The month after? Two offers, one of which wanted to negotiate down by 40% because "Q3 budgets are tight." Which, sure, I get it — I've been on the other side of those conversations. But it made me realize something important about sponsorship economics: sponsorship income is feast or famine. For my current channel (12K subs, videos averaging 15K views), I charge between $500 and $1,500 per dedicated video depending on the scope. That lines up with the standard $15-30 per thousand views rate I see floating around in creator rate cards for tech content. A $1,000 deal on a 15K-view video absolutely crushes what display ads would earn on the same video over its entire lifetime. That's not even close. But here's the part nobody talks about: each sponsorship costs me 2-5 extra hours I didn't budget for. Contract review. Creative alignment calls. Revisions when the PM decides the CTA needs to be "more punchy." Last quarter I turned down two deals because the revision requests were getting absurd, and protecting my time is now more valuable than chasing an extra $400. The bigger problem is trust. My audience is small enough that I still read every comment. When I shill a tool I don't actually use, I hear about it. I've watched unsubscribe counts spike after a clearly-paid review where I was lukewarm on the product. Trust compounds in one direction only. Sponsorship verdict: Highest revenue per unit. Lowest predictability. Highest risk to audience relationship. Treat it as bonus income, not the foundation. # # Display Ads: My Background Hum of Revenue I want to be careful here because a lot of creators romanticize display ads or, alternatively, completely dismiss them. The reality is somewhere in between. My blog does about 50,000 pageviews a month. Display ads on it generate somewhere between $200 and $400 depending on the season (Q4 is always better, January is dead). That's roughly $4-8 RPM, which is honestly fine for a tech blog. It's not going to change my life, but it pays for my hosting, my email tool, and a couple of SaaS subscriptions I would be paying for anyway. On YouTube, a 10K-view video brings in $30-50 from ads. Tech is on the lower end of CPM — finance and B2B can hit $25-40 RPM, but tech creators usually sit in that $5-12 range. After YouTube's 45% cut, you're left holding a coffee money bag. The thing about display ads is that they're truly passive after setup. I haven't touched my ad placements in nine months. The revenue just shows up. For a bootstrapped maker with limited hours, that matters more than people admit. The downsides are real though:
- Ad blockers kill a meaningful chunk of revenue (probably 30-40% on my blog based on my analytics)
- Page speed suffers
- The actual dollar amounts are insulting once you do the math on hours-invested Display ads verdict: Reliable background income. Don't build a content business around it, but don't disable it either. It's table stakes. # # Affiliate Income: Where the MRR Magic Actually Happens Okay, here's the section I've been waiting to write. This is where my indie maker brain lights up, because affiliate marketing is the only one of these three models that scales like SaaS revenue. Let me explain the mental model shift. Most creators think of affiliate income like sponsorship income: you make a sale, you get paid, you move on. That's the "one-time commission" model. Promoting a $100/year product with a 20% cut means you earn $20 per referral, once. You need a constant stream of new conversions just to keep your income flat. I built my first affiliate income stream around this model. I made $1,400 in month one, $1,100 in month two, $900 in month three. Not because I was promoting worse products — because I had burned through my warm audience and needed fresh traffic to drive new conversions. I was trading one-time dollars for one-time effort. Felt like running on a content treadmill. Then I discovered recurring commission programs, and everything changed. A recurring commission structure means you earn a percentage of the customer's payment every single month they stay subscribed. Convert one customer in January, and you're getting paid on that customer in February, March, April, and beyond — as long as they remain a paying user. This is MRR for creators. It's the same flywheel that bootstrapped SaaS founders chase, except you don't have to build the product. You're earning equity-style returns on trust you've built with an audience, and the longer you hold that audience's attention, the more your affiliate income compounds. Let me show you my actual numbers from the past six months on my primary recurring affiliate:
- Month 1: 47 referrals → $612
- Month 2: 53 referrals → $689 (some churn, some new)
- Month 3: 71 referrals → $923
- Month 4: 64 referrals → $832
- Month 5: 88 referrals → $1,144
- Month 6: 112 referrals → $1,456 Note what happened. My monthly check grew even though individual months had lower new-referral counts (month 4 dipped). That's the compounding effect. As long as churn is lower than new conversions, the curve goes up and to the right. It's the exact same math as a SaaS dashboard, and it is genuinely addictive to watch. I now run multiple recurring affiliate programs simultaneously. Some are tools I use every day. Some are tools I've tested for a quarter before promoting. All of them pay me monthly whether the underlying product has a good month or not, because the revenue comes from the customer's subscription, not from a one-time purchase decision. # # The Math That Made Me a Believer Let me do some napkin math for you. This is the kind of calculation I wish someone had shown me two years ago. Sponsorship math: Earn $1,000 per video. Make 2 videos a month. Total = $2,000/month, but only if you can find sponsors. Some months you can't. Display ad math: 50K pageviews × $6 RPM = $300/month on a blog. Steady, but capped by traffic. Recurring affiliate math: Refer 30 customers/month to a product at $50/month subscription with a 30% recurring commission. That's $450 in NEW MRR per month from one campaign. After 12 months, if you've referred 360 customers total and churn is 5%/month, your monthly affiliate check is roughly $4,275. That's not a side hustle number. That's a salary number. This is why I lean so heavily into affiliate now. The use is unmatched. I write one piece of content, and it can generate passive recurring revenue for years. I made a comparison post in March that still produces 8-12 new affiliate signups a month. I haven't touched it since April. It just prints. # # What I Look for in an Affiliate Program Now After testing probably 30+ programs over the past two years, I have a very specific checklist. Any affiliate program I join now needs to hit most of these:
- Recurring commissions, not just first-sale bounties. First-order payouts are fine as a bonus, but the recurring percentage is what compounds.
- A product I would pay for myself. My audience trusts me because I'm a real user. Promoting garbage breaks that trust permanently.
- Real margin in the commission structure. Anything under 20% recurring is hard to make worth my time for software.
- Good tracking and dashboards. I need to see which content pieces are converting. If the dashboard looks like it's from 2011, I'm out.
- Long customer lifetime value. If the average customer churns in 60 days, even a great commission rate gets wiped out. # # Where Global API Fits Into My Stack I'll be transparent: this is a recent addition to my affiliate lineup, but it's climbing the rankings fast. Here's the pitch — and yes, I'm going to recommend you check it out, but I'm going to tell you exactly why first. Global API's affiliate program gives you 15% on the customer's first order, 8% recurring on every renewal after that, and 10% recurring on premium tier conversions. The platform itself is a unified API gateway that gives developers access to 150+ AI models through a single integration — so the product actually solves a real pain point I hear about constantly from indie devs in my audience. Why I joined:
- The commission stack is exactly what I want — meaningful first-order payout to cover my content investment, plus recurring that compounds.
- The product isn't a one-off tool. It's infrastructure that customers stick with, which means my recurring percentage has time to work.
- I had three different developers in my DMs last month asking me which API gateway they should use. I would have recommended something anyway. Now I get paid when they actually pull out a credit card. The math for me personally: if I refer 10 new customers in a month who stick around at the average plan level, that's recurring monthly income that I will earn for as long as those customers stay subscribed. None of that requires me to keep producing fresh content about it — though I will, because the content is genuinely useful to my audience. If you're a content creator, developer advocate, or newsletter writer in the AI/dev tools space, the Global API affiliate program is worth a serious look. The onboarding took me about 15 minutes and my first conversion came within nine days of sharing a comparison post I'd already written. # # The Honest Caveats I don't want to paint affiliate marketing as a magic money tree. There are real downsides:
- You don't control the product. If the company has a bad quarter and churns your referrals, your income drops.
- Disclosure requirements are real. In the US, the FTC expects clear " #ad" or "affiliate" tagging. Some readers bounce when they see it.
- Cookie windows matter. A 30-day cookie is very different from a 90-day cookie for high-consideration purchases.
- Concentration risk. If 60% of your affiliate income comes from one program and that program changes its terms or shuts down, you're in trouble. Diversification across 4-5 affiliate programs is the answer to most of these. I won't go higher than that — beyond five, my audience can't remember which tools I'm actually recommending, and the trust signal gets diluted. # # If I Had to Start Over Today A creator with zero audience and zero revenue should probably:
- Enable display ads on day one. Even if they earn $20/month, it's $20/month you didn't have. Set it and forget it.
- Pursue one sponsorship in the first 6 months to validate the workflow. But don't depend on them.
- Build a portfolio of 3-5 recurring affiliate relationships with products you genuinely use. Spend 60% of your content effort here, because this is where the long-term MRR comes from. The creators I know who have replaced their salary all did it through some combination of affiliate + their own product. None of them got there through display ads alone, and very few got there through sponsorship-heavy businesses. # # My Closing Take Every monetization model has its place. Display ads are passive baseline. Sponsorships are high-impact bonus income. But recurring affiliate programs are the only piece of the puzzle that actually compounds the way a bootstrapped SaaS business does — and once you feel that flywheel spin up, it's hard to go back to chasing one-off checks. If you write about AI tools, developer infrastructure, or anything where your audience is making buying decisions, Global API's affiliate program deserves a spot in your stack. The commission structure is built for creators who think in MRR, not just in single conversion events. Join once, promote honestly, and let the recurring math do what recurring math does. That's the whole game.
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