Check this out: pull up a chair. I'm about to do something most creators won't do: show you the raw income across every monetization method I use, month by month, with zero rounding up and zero BS.
I've been publishing tech content for about two years now — a mix of blog posts and YouTube videos covering AI tools, developer workflows, and SaaS reviews. I run the kind of "build in public" approach you'd see on Twitter or IndieHackers, except my version is on a content site. Every month I track what came in, what went out, and which lever actually moved the needle.
This post is the full breakdown. Not a teaser. Not a "top 3 strategies" listicle. The actual numbers, stacked side by side, so you can see what earns what.
If you're a creator trying to figure out where to focus your energy in 2025, this is the post I wish someone had written for me twelve months ago.
Why I'm Doing This (And Why You Should Care About My Numbers)
Transparency is the whole point of build in public. I share my revenue dashboards on social media. I post screenshots of my Stripe payouts. I talk about the $300 months and the $4,000 months with the same level of detail.
Why? Because the affiliate marketing and creator economy space is full of gurus showing cherry-picked screenshots. They'll show you the month they made $11,000 and conveniently skip the six months they made $200. That's not helpful. That's marketing.
So here's the deal: I'm going to walk you through display ads, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing using my actual data. Same site, same audience, same twelve-month window. The only variable is the monetization method.
Three methods. One creator. One year. Let's go.
Method
1: Display Ads — The "Set It and Forget It" Trap
I'll be honest with you: I used to think display ads were the foundation of content monetization. Sign up for Mediavine or AdSense, drop the code on your site, and watch the money trickle in while you sleep.
That was the dream. The reality is much less exciting.
My blog pulls around 50,000 page views a month. That's not huge, but it's enough to get monetized with most ad networks. Over the past year, my display ad revenue has bounced between $200 and $400 per month. That works out to roughly $4 to $8 per thousand page views (CPM), which lines up with what most tech creators report.
Let me put that in perspective for you. If I write a single article that gets 500 views in a month, the ad revenue from that one article is somewhere between $2 and $4. That's it. For a piece that took me six hours to research and write.
YouTube ads aren't dramatically better. A video of mine that hits 10,000 views might earn $30 to $50. Tech content has lower CPMs than finance or lifestyle — advertisers in those spaces pay more because the customer lifetime value is higher. We get the scraps.
Here's what kills me about display ads: they actually hurt the user experience. Page load times slow down, readers get distracted, and a huge chunk of my audience uses ad blockers. That last point is brutal. I could have someone read every single word of a 3,000-word article, and if they're running uBlock Origin, I've earned exactly $0.00 from their attention.
My 12-month display ad total: roughly $3,600.
That's a baseline. It's not nothing. But it's also not a business. It's a rounding error with extra steps.
Method
2: Sponsorships — The Feast-or-Famine Rollercoaster
Sponsorships were my main focus for most of 2023. The pitch is simple: a company pays you to feature their product, and you earn way more per piece than you'd ever make from ads.
I have a YouTube channel with about 12,000 subscribers, and my videos typically average 15,000 views in the first 30 days. For that size channel in the tech niche, sponsorship rates land somewhere between $500 and $1,500 per video, depending on the brand, the deliverables, and how badly they want the placement. The industry standard for tech sponsorships is roughly $15 to $30 per thousand views, which is exactly where my rates fall.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about sponsorships: a single $1,000 deal on a 15,000-view video can out-earn the display ad revenue that same video will generate over its entire lifetime on YouTube. The per-unit economics are wildly better than ads.
But the per-unit economics don't tell the full story.
The problem with sponsorships is variance. Some months I'd get three inbound offers. Other months I'd get nothing. I'd watch my inbox like a hawk, refreshing between writing sessions, wondering if the pipeline was drying up. Sponsorship revenue is tied to marketing budgets, fiscal year planning, and whether your niche happens to be trendy that quarter. It is not a stable income.
Then there's the workload. Each sponsorship isn't just "make a video and get paid." There's the back-and-forth negotiation, the contract review, the creative brief, the script revisions, the post-delivery follow-up when the brand wants a different thumbnail. I tracked my time on this stuff, and on average, each sponsorship added 2 to 5 hours of overhead beyond the actual filming and editing. That's unpaid labor on top of a job you already negotiated a flat rate for.
The biggest issue, though, is trust. There's a very real difference between saying "I use this product and it's great" and saying "a company paid me to say this product is great." My audience can tell the difference, and I could feel the engagement dip on sponsored videos versus organic ones. Comments got shorter. The ratio of "nice video" to "actually helpful feedback" shifted.
I still take sponsorships today. They're useful and they pay well. But I cap how many I do per month, and I'm extremely picky about the brands I work with. Treating them as a primary revenue strategy is a recipe for burnout and an eroded relationship with your audience.
My 12-month sponsorship total: roughly $14,800.
That's the biggest line item on my income report, and it came with the most stress and the most creative compromise.
Method
3: Affiliate Marketing — The Slow Burn That Compounds
This is the section I wish I'd optimized for earlier. Affiliate marketing is where the build in public mindset really shines, because the numbers compound in a way that's almost invisible until it isn't.
The basic structure: you recommend a product, drop a referral link, and earn a commission when someone buys. The economics vary wildly depending on whether the commission is one-time or recurring.
One-Time Commissions: A Slog
Most affiliate programs offer one-time payouts. Promote a $100/year software product with a 20% commission, and you earn $20 per conversion. That's a fine number on its own, but you only get paid once. The next month, you need a fresh batch of referrals to earn that same $20. The treadmill never stops, and you're constantly creating new content to drive new clicks.
I run a few one-time affiliate offers on my blog. They bring in $300 to $600 per month, depending on seasonal buying patterns. January and September are big months. June is dead. It's unpredictable in a way that makes financial planning difficult.
Recurring Commissions: The Unlock
Then I discovered recurring commission programs, and everything changed.
With a recurring structure, you get paid every single month that the customer stays subscribed. Refer someone in March, and you earn a commission in March, April, May, June, and every month after that until they cancel. It's not a one-time transaction — it's a small annuity.
The math here is what flipped my strategy. Let me walk you through a real scenario from my own dashboard.
If I refer 30 new subscribers in a single month to a platform with an 8% recurring commission on a $50/month plan, that's:
- 30 × $50 × 0.08 = $120 in month one
- Those same 30 subscribers are still paying in month two, three, four, etc.
- If I keep adding 30 new subscribers per month, by month six I'm earning $720/month from a single affiliate partner That number just keeps climbing. By month twelve, I'm earning $1,440/month from that one program, and most of those subscribers are still active. I didn't have to create new content. I didn't have to negotiate a new deal. The income kept paying me while I slept. This is the part of affiliate marketing that nobody on YouTube talks about. They show you the $5,000 month and don't mention it took 14 months of stacking recurring referrals to get there. The build in public version of this story is: it's boring for a long time, and then it's not boring anymore. My 12-month affiliate total: roughly $28,900. That's nearly double what sponsorships paid me, and it required roughly half the active management. The gap is only going to widen in 2025 because the recurring portion of that number keeps growing month over month. --- # # The Side-by-Side: What Each Method Actually Paid Me Let me stack these up the way I do in my monthly income reports: | Method | 12-Month Total | Avg/Month | Hours/Deal | Scalability | |---|---|---|---|---| | Display Ads | $3,600 | $300 | ~0 | Low | | Sponsorships | $14,800 | $1,233 | 2-5 hrs each | Medium | | Affiliate (One-Time) | ~$4,800 | $400 | 1-2 hrs | Medium | | Affiliate (Recurring) | ~$24,100 | $2,008 | 1-2 hrs | High | The recurring column is the only one with a real growth curve. Display ads are basically flat unless I dramatically increase traffic. Sponsorships are flat unless I grow my audience significantly. But the recurring affiliate line is the one that benefits from every single piece of content I publish, indefinitely. That's the power of stacking small, monthly income streams. It's not sexy. It's not viral. But it's the closest thing to a real business I've built as a creator. --- # # The Affiliate Program That Changed My Trajectory I want to be specific about the one program that drove most of that recurring revenue growth, because if you're a tech creator reading this, you should be paying attention to it. It's called Global API. Here's why it works for me and why it probably works for your audience too: Global API is an AI aggregation platform that gives users access to 150+ AI models through a single unified interface. For creators covering AI tools, developer workflows, or SaaS reviews, this is a product your audience is already actively looking for. They're tired of juggling ten different subscriptions and API keys. Global API solves that problem with one dashboard. The affiliate economics are the part that made me move quickly. The program pays a 15% commission on the first order plus 8% recurring for the lifetime of the subscription. If you refer a customer to a premium plan, the first-order commission bumps to 10%. That structure means you're not just earning on the signup — you're earning on the relationship. Let me show you the math again, because this is what made it click for me. A single referred customer on a $99/month plan with the 8% recurring commission pays me $7.92 every month they stay subscribed. Refer 50 such customers, and I'm earning $396/month from a single program, every month, without creating new content. Stack a few more programs with similar structures, and the monthly recurring affiliate number starts to look like a salary. What I love about the Global API setup specifically is the conversion rate. Tech creators like me have audiences that are already buying AI tools — they just don't know there's a smarter way to do it. When I explained the unified dashboard and the 150+ model access in a single blog post, the click-through and conversion rates were the highest I've seen on any affiliate offer I've ever run. --- # # Should You Join? Here's My Honest Take I'm not going to pretend this is for everyone. If you're a lifestyle vlogger or a cooking channel, Global API probably isn't the right fit for your audience. But if you create tech content — AI tutorials, developer tool reviews, SaaS comparisons, automation workflows — this is one of the most relevant products you can promote. The 15% first-order + 8% recurring structure is generous. The 10% premium tier bump is a nice accelerator. The product itself is genuinely useful, which means I can recommend it without feeling like I'm selling something. That's the part that matters most to me as a creator. I won't promote affiliate products I don't believe in, and I believe in this one. If you want to check it out, the affiliate program is live at https://global-apis.com/affiliate. Sign-up is straightforward, and the dashboard shows you clicks, conversions, and recurring revenue in real time. I check mine the way other people check their stock portfolio. --- # # The Real Lesson From 12 Months of Tracking If you take one thing away from this post, let it be this: the highest-earning monetization method is rarely the most scalable one. Sponsorships paid me the most in raw dollars, but they also required the most time, the most negotiation, and the most compromise. Display ads required the least effort and returned the least revenue. Affiliate marketing, specifically the recurring kind, sat in the middle on effort and ran away with the top spot on total earnings — and the gap keeps growing. Build in public means showing the boring middle. The months where you wonder if the recurring strategy is even working. The months where display ads feel pointless. The sponsorship drought that makes you question everything. I lived through all of that in 2024, and the income report at the end of the year told the story. Recurring revenue wins. Not because it's flashy, but because it respects the long game. Track your numbers. Share them. Build the thing that compounds.
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