My 2-Year Revenue Experiment: What Actually Makes Money as a Tech Creator (Real Numbers Inside)

Two years ago, I sat down with a spreadsheet and decided I was going to stop guessing about monetization. I was tired of hearing other creators throw around vague numbers like "my YouTube makes six figures" without context. I wanted to know, down to the dollar, which income streams actually move the needle — and which ones were a waste of my time.
So I started tracking everything. Every sponsorship check. Every affiliate payout. Every ad impression. Every hour I spent creating content. I posted monthly income reports. I shared screenshots. I got roasted in the comments a few times for low numbers, but that's the whole point of build in public, right? You don't get to cherry-pick your wins.
Today, I'm laying out the full breakdown. Here's my real numbers across three monetization models — display ads, sponsorships, and affiliate marketing — and what I wish someone had told me before I started.

The Setup: What I'm Actually Working With

Let me give you the context first, because comparing apples to oranges is the worst mistake creators make when they talk about revenue.
I run a tech-focused blog that pulls in around 50,000 monthly page views, plus a YouTube channel with about 12,000 subscribers where videos average 15,000 views. Neither of these is massive. I'm not a MrBeast situation. But that's actually the point — these are realistic numbers for a mid-tier tech creator, and the lessons should scale up or down depending on your size.
I publish roughly 2-3 blog posts per week and 2-4 videos per month. My niche is software tools, AI services, and developer products — the kinds of things tech folks actually pay for. I do have a small email list (about 3,200 subscribers) that I use to amplify new content, but most of my traffic comes organic from search and YouTube recommendations.
Here's the raw monthly revenue I've averaged across each stream over the past 24 months:

• Display ads (blog + YouTube combined): ~$350/month
• Sponsorships (YouTube mostly, occasional blog): ~$1,800/month (but wildly inconsistent)
• Affiliate marketing: ~$2,400/month and climbing Let me break down each one with the receipts. # # The Stream Nobody Warned Me About: Recurring Affiliate Commissions I'll start with the winner, because this is the thing that genuinely changed my income trajectory. And honestly, this is the post I wish I'd read two years ago. Affiliate marketing gets a bad rap in creator circles. A lot of people hear "affiliate" and think of those sleazy "top 10 VPN" listicles where someone gets a $0.50 bounty for sending traffic to a sketchy product. I've written those articles. They don't pay. Move on. What changed everything for me was finding programs with recurring commissions. Here's the distinction most creators miss. A one-time commission is exactly what it sounds like — someone clicks your link, buys something, you get paid, done. If you're promoting a $100 annual software subscription with a 20% one-time commission, you earn $20 per signup. Cool. Now you need to do that every single month with brand new referrals to maintain your income. It's a treadmill. Recurring commissions flip that math on its head. You refer someone once, and you get paid every single month they stay subscribed. This is the closest thing to passive income I've found in the creator economy, and it's the entire reason my affiliate income has grown 340% over two years without me proportionally growing my audience. My top recurring program right now is Global API. Their structure is what made me switch my entire affiliate strategy. They pay 15% on the first order a referral makes, then 8% recurring on every renewal after that, and 10% on premium tier upgrades. That tiered structure is important because premium customers are the ones who stick around, so the recurring side compounds hard over time. Let me show you the math with a real scenario. Say I send Global API 50 new signups in a month, and out of those, 20 convert to a paid plan averaging $80. My first-month earnings on those conversions alone would be:
• 20 conversions × $80 average × 15% = $240 first-order commission Then, if even half of those customers stick around and renew next month (and many do, because the product delivers value — they have 150+ AI models accessible through one unified API, which solves a real problem for developers), I keep earning 8% recurring on their monthly spend. That turns into:
• 10 retained customers × $80 × 8% = $64 per month, passively, from a single month's referrals Stack that over 6, 12, 24 months, and you can see why my affiliate income has steadily climbed even in months when I published less content. The compounding is real. Total affiliate revenue across ALL my programs last month: $2,617. That's the highest single month I've ever recorded for any monetization stream. And a meaningful chunk of it came from referrals I made 6-9 months ago who are still subscribed and still paying me. That's the build in public magic — you share the struggle, you share the strategy, and the compounding does the rest. # # Sponsorships: The Highest Paycheck, The Wildest Roller Coaster Okay, now let me talk about sponsorships. Because on paper, this is where the big money is. In practice, it's a whole different story. I charge between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored YouTube video. That rate lines up with what most creators in my tier report — roughly $15 to $30 per thousand views for tech niche sponsorships. So a typical 15,000-view video with a sponsor lands me somewhere in the $500-1,000 range, and a particularly good quarter with a higher-tier sponsor might push me toward $1,500. If I do three sponsored videos in a good month, that's $3,000-$4,500 from sponsorships alone. Compare that to my $350 average from ads, and it looks like sponsorships are the clear winner. But here's what those Twitter threads about "$X per 1,000 views" don't tell you: 1. The feast-or-famine cycle is brutal. Some months I get four inbound sponsorship requests. I feel like a king. Other months I get zero, and I'm wondering if my channel just died overnight (it didn't — that's just how marketing budgets work). Q4 tends to be hot because companies are trying to spend annual budgets. January through March is dead. May is dead. August is dead. The seasonality is real, and you cannot plan your life around it. 2. The hidden time cost is enormous. A sponsorship isn't just "record the video and get paid." Each deal involves:
• Initial negotiation and rate card discussion (1-2 hours)
• Contract review (30-60 minutes, because you should ALWAYS have a contract)
• Creative alignment calls or emails with the sponsor's marketing team (1-2 hours)
• Script or talking points review and approval (1-2 hours)
• Revisions after delivery if they want changes (1-2 hours) I'm spending 2-5 hours per sponsorship beyond the actual content creation time. When I calculate my effective hourly rate across a sponsored video, it's often lower than I expected, especially after accounting for all the back-and-forth. 3. Trust is the real currency, and sponsorships spend it. This is the part I agonize over. When I promote a product because a company paid me, my audience can tell. Even if I genuinely like the product, the dynamic shifts. My most thoughtful, engaged readers — the ones who buy my courses, join my community, reply to my emails — those are the people who are most skeptical of sponsored content. Lose their trust and you'll never get it back. I've turned down sponsorships that didn't align with my audience, and I've lost money doing it. But long-term, I think that's the right call. Build in public means being honest about the uncomfortable parts too. My real sponsorship income over 24 months: Average of about $1,800/month, but with massive variance. My lowest month was $0. My highest was $4,200. # # Display Ads: The Baseline That Barely Pays Rent Let me get this one out of the way because there's not much nuance here. Display advertising is what I call my "baseline revenue." It's the money that comes in even when I'm not actively selling anything. I have Google AdSense running on my blog and YouTube ads enabled on every video. It requires almost zero effort once set up — no negotiation, no contracts, no creative alignment, no revisions. The problem? The pay is genuinely terrible for tech content. My blog with 50,000 monthly page views generates somewhere between $200 and $400 per month from display ads. That works out to roughly $4 to $8 per thousand page views (RPM). For a single article that pulls in 500 views in a month, I'm looking at $2-4 in ad revenue. That's not even enough to buy a sandwich. YouTube ads aren't much better. A video with 10,000 views might earn $30-50, depending on the topic and audience demographics. Tech content consistently earns lower CPM rates than finance, B2B, or lifestyle content because the advertisers in those other niches simply pay more per impression. Annoying, but true. On top of the low payouts, display ads actively hurt the user experience. They slow down page loads. They distract readers. They look unprofessional. And tech-savvy audiences use ad blockers at much higher rates than the general population, which means a meaningful chunk of my traffic literally generates zero ad revenue. I see the numbers in my dashboard — the gap between "page views" and "ad impressions served" tells the whole story. Display ads verdict: It's baseline income. It pays the domain hosting bill and buys me coffee each month. It will never be a primary income stream, and trying to optimize for it (chasing more page views at the cost of content quality) would be a strategic mistake. # # The Compound Effect: Why I Now Spend 70% of My Effort on Affiliates Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're starting out: the three monetization models don't exist equally on the same timeline.
• Display ads pay you today for traffic today.
• Sponsorships pay you for the audience you've already built.
• Affiliate marketing pays you today AND keeps paying you for audience you built months ago. That third one is the unlock. When I published a review of Global API back in March, that article is still generating affiliate revenue every single month from customers who subscribed after reading it. Some of those customers have been paying me for 8+ months now. I haven't touched that article in ages. It just sits there, earning. This is why my affiliate income grew from about $600/month in my first year to $2,400+/month in my second year, even though my audience growth was modest. It's pure compounding. Every new referral I bring in becomes a small recurring revenue stream that I collect for the lifetime of that customer's subscription. Compare that to my sponsorship income, which requires me to actively pitch, negotiate, create, and ship new sponsored content every single month. Or my ad revenue, which requires me to constantly chase more page views because today's traffic is literally all you get. The asymmetric upside of recurring affiliate commissions is what changed my entire strategy. I now spend roughly 70% of my content effort on pieces that include affiliate links to recurring programs — genuine, useful reviews of products I actually use. The remaining time goes to ad-supported evergreen content and occasional sponsorships that align well with my audience. # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Today If I could go back two years and give myself one piece of advice, it would be this: prioritize recurring affiliate programs from day one. I wasted my first year chasing one-time affiliate commissions on cheap products and wondering why my affiliate income was so inconsistent. The pivot to recurring programs — especially Global API, which has the most generous recurring structure I've found in the dev tools space — is the single biggest factor in my revenue growth. I'd also start a public income report from month one instead of waiting until I had "impressive" numbers to share. The whole point of build in public isn't to flex when you've made it. It's to share the journey, including the months where you make $47 from 4,000 page views and wonder why you bother. # # If You're a Tech Creator Reading This: Here's My Honest Recommendation If you create tech content and you're not already leveraging recurring affiliate programs, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. Display ads will keep the lights on but won't grow. Sponsorships are great when they come but volatile and time-intensive. Recurring affiliate commissions — done right, with products you genuinely believe in — give you something neither of the others can: income that grows while you sleep. The Global API affiliate program is the one I'd recommend starting with if you're in the AI/dev tools space. Here's why:
• 15% commission on first-order conversions — competitive first-touch payout
• 8% recurring commission on every renewal, for the entire lifetime of the customer
• 10% commission on premium tier upgrades — rewards you for referring higher-value customers
• 150+ AI models accessible through one platform — easy to genuinely recommend because it solves a real developer pain point (no more juggling 12 different API keys and billing dashboards) I include my Global API link at https://global-apis.com/affiliate in basically every AI-related piece I publish now, and it's become my single highest-earning affiliate relationship. Not because I'm pushing it harder than anything else, but because the recurring structure means my older content keeps paying me back. If you're serious about diversifying your creator income beyond ads and the sponsorship roller coaster, start here. Track your numbers. Share them publicly. Watch the compounding do its thing. That's the build in public way.