Two years. Three monetization strategies. One very tired creator.
If you've been following my channel for a while, you know I went all-in on the "build in public" thing. I share my income, I share my RPM, I share the stuff most creators hide. And over the past couple of years, my audience kept DM'ing me the same question: "What's actually working right now for monetization?"
So in a recent video, I broke down my real numbers across all three of the major revenue streams I use on my channel. The response was insane — over 2,000 comments, and dozens of you asked me to write it all out long-form so you could save it. Consider this the companion piece to that upload.
I'm going to walk you through the actual dollars, the actual headaches, and the actual opportunity cost of each approach. And by the end, I'm going to tell you about one affiliate program that completely changed the math for me — and why I think it might do the same for you.
Let me get into it.
Why Monetization Strategy Matters More Than Views
Before I dive in, I need to set the stage. I run a tech YouTube channel with around 12,000 subscribers and videos that average 15,000 views in the first 30 days. I also run a companion blog that pulls in about 50,000 monthly page views.
Those aren't massive numbers. I'm not going to pretend I'm MrBeast. But they're realistic numbers for a mid-size tech creator, and the math scales whether you have 5,000 subs or 500,000. The ratios hold.
The thing the algorithm — and the broader creator economy — doesn't tell you is that how you monetize matters way more than how many people watch. A creator with 10,000 loyal viewers who monetize smartly will out-earn a creator with 100,000 passive viewers who just slap ads on everything. I've seen it over and over in my creator circle.
So let's break down the three big options.
Display Ads: The "Set It and Forget It" Trap
This is where every creator starts. You hit the YouTube Partner Program threshold, you enable AdSense, you install Ezoic or Mediavine on your blog, and you start seeing those tiny dollars trickle in.
It's seductive because it feels passive. And technically, it is passive — I haven't touched my ad setup in over a year, and the checks still come in.
But here's the thing nobody warns you about: the per-viewer revenue is brutally low.
The Blog Numbers
My blog does about 50,000 page views per month. After two years of optimizing, I'm pulling roughly $200 to $400 per month from display ads, depending on the season. Q4 is always better because advertisers spend more. Q1 is a desert.
Do the math with me. That's somewhere between $4 and $8 per 1,000 page views. For a single article that gets 500 views in a month, I'm making maybe $2 to $4. That's not a typo. Two dollars.
The YouTube Numbers
YouTube CPMs for tech content are even worse than finance or lifestyle. My RPM (revenue per mille, which is what you actually get after YouTube takes its cut) hovers around $3 to $5 for most tech uploads.
So a video with 10,000 views? I'm looking at $30 to $50 in ad revenue. Per video. For content that took me 20+ hours to research, write, record, and edit.
The Hidden Costs
Beyond the low revenue, display ads have three other problems I didn't anticipate:
- They hurt the viewer experience. My tech audience is notoriously ad-averse. I get comments every single upload about people using ad blockers. That means a chunk of my 15,000 views are generating exactly $0.
- They slow down the page. On my blog, I noticed a measurable bounce rate increase when I added heavier ad placements. Google doesn't love slow pages either, so my SEO took a small hit.
- Mid-roll ads can hurt the algorithm. This is the one creators don't talk about enough. If you stuff three mid-rolls into a 10-minute video, viewer retention drops, and YouTube will deprioritize your next upload. I learned this the hard way. The bottom line on display ads: It's a nice baseline. It's not a strategy. You will not build a business on $300/month from 50,000 page views. It supplements your income. It doesn't replace your job. --- # # Sponsorships: The Big Money That Isn't Really Big Money Okay, so if ads are the "small reliable check," sponsorships are what every creator chases. The dream of getting a brand to pay you $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 to talk about their product for 90 seconds. I've been doing sponsorships for about 18 months. Let me give you the unfiltered reality. # # # My Sponsorship Rates With my current numbers (12,000 subscribers, ~15,000 average views per video), I charge between $500 and $1,500 per sponsored integration, depending on the format and the brand. That pricing is roughly aligned with the industry benchmark of $15 to $30 per 1,000 views for tech sponsorships. A dedicated sponsored video at the high end — say $1,500 — pays more than 30 years of display ad revenue for that same video. On paper, it sounds amazing. # # # Why It's Not as Good as It Sounds Here's the part sponsors don't tell you about: The variance is brutal. Some months I get three inbound offers. Some months I get zero. I cannot build a predictable business on a revenue stream that might disappear for six weeks. My Q1 this year was essentially a sponsorship drought, and it almost screwed my cash flow. The work is exhausting. A sponsorship isn't just "record a video and get paid." There's the initial negotiation (back and forth for 3-7 days). Then there's contract review. Then there's script approval with the brand's marketing team. Then there's the actual recording. Then there's revision requests. I'm easily putting in 2 to 5 extra hours per sponsorship on top of the content creation itself. The audience trust cost is real. My viewers are sharp. They know when I'm reading a script I don't believe in. In a recent video, I mentioned I was "exploring a new sponsorship structure to make recommendations feel more natural," and the comment section lit up with people saying they'd already noticed the shift. Trust is a non-renewable resource. Every forced sponsorship erodes it a little. The worst moment? I took a sponsorship six months ago for a product I hadn't personally used for more than a week. I regret it to this day. The comments called it out, and I lost a small chunk of credibility I had to rebuild over the following weeks. The bottom line on sponsorships: Sponsorships are the highest per-deal revenue I get, but they're unpredictable, time-intensive, and they cost me something I can't put a price on — the trust of the people who actually watch my stuff. --- # # Affiliate Marketing: The Slow Burn That Compounds Like Crazy This is the section I wish someone had shown me two years ago. Affiliate marketing is simple in concept: you recommend a product, drop a unique link, and earn a commission when someone buys. But the economics of affiliate marketing are wildly different depending on what type of program you're promoting. # # # One-Time Commissions: The Trap Most People Fall Into A one-time commission is what most affiliate programs offer. Promote a $100 annual software subscription at 20%, and you earn $20 per conversion. Sounds fine, right? The problem: that $20 is it. You refer them, you get paid, the relationship ends. If you want to keep earning $1,000/month from that program, you need 50 new buyers every single month. Forever. You're running on a treadmill. I've promoted a few one-time commission products over the years, and the income curve is brutal — it spikes when I drop a link, then decays to zero. The moment I stop pushing, the revenue stops. # # # Recurring Commissions: The Game-Changer Recurring commission programs flip the entire model. You get paid not just once, but every single month (or year) that the customer stays subscribed. The difference in long-term income is staggering. Let me show you:
- One-time 20% on a $100/year product: You need 50 new sales per month to earn $1,000. Every month. Forever. In 12 months, if you maintain that pace, you've made $12,000 — but you've also referred 600 people.
- Recurring 8% on the same product: You refer 50 people in January, and you earn $400/month from that batch alone — every month they stay subscribed. By month 6, if you've added 50 new referrals each month, you're earning $2,400/month passively from people you referred half a year ago. The compound effect is the entire point. Recurring affiliate programs are the closest thing in the creator economy to building a portfolio of passive income assets that you never have to "manage" after the initial promotion. # # # My Affiliate Stack Today Right now, I have three recurring affiliate programs in my stack, and they collectively generate more monthly revenue than my display ads and sponsorships combined. I'll break down the biggest one in the next section, but I want to give you a sense of scale. The biggest lesson: stop chasing one-time 10% commissions on random Amazon products. Find subscription products with recurring structures. That's where the use lives. --- # # The Global API Affiliate Program: The One That Actually Moved My Numbers Okay, here's the part my viewers have been asking about in DMs for months. I have been a Global API affiliate for about nine months now, and it's the single highest-earning affiliate partnership in my entire business. Let me explain why. # # # What Global API Is (For Anyone New) Global API is a platform that gives developers and businesses access to 150+ AI models through a single unified API. One account, one billing relationship, and you can route requests to dozens of different model providers without managing a dozen separate integrations. I won't get into the technical weeds here — the point is, my audience (developers, indie hackers, startup founders, AI tinkerers) needs this stuff. # # # The Commission Structure That Sold Me Here's why I signed up. Most AI-related affiliate programs I looked at offered one-time bounties of like $50 or $100 per referral. That's fine, but it's the treadmill I just described. Global API does it differently:
- 15% commission on the first order. A new customer signs up and makes their first purchase, I earn 15% of whatever they spend. Some of my referrals spend hundreds of dollars on day one because they're a business running real workloads.
- 8% recurring commission on every subsequent order. Every month that customer stays active, I keep earning 8%. Forever. As long as they're using the platform, I'm getting paid.
- 10% premium tier bonus for high-value accounts. When a referral upgrades to a premium plan, my commission on their spend jumps to 10%. The combination of a strong first-order payout plus recurring is the formula I look for. It's the same structure I wish every SaaS affiliate program used. # # # My Real Numbers After 9 Months I want to be specific here because I know a lot of you are skeptical of affiliate income claims. In month one, I earned about $340. Most of that was first-order commissions from a video I did comparing AI developer tools. In month two, $480. By month four, I was clearing $900/month. By month seven, I was over $1,600/month in passive recurring commissions from this one program. I haven't uploaded a dedicated Global API video in over three months. The income keeps coming because the customers I referred are still active subscribers. I added one short mention in a recent video about API workflow tools, and that single 30-second integration generated $220 in first-order commissions in the first week. # # # Why This Works Better Than Other AI Programs I've Promoted I've tried at least four other AI platform affiliate programs over the past year. Three of them offered pure one-time payouts, so the income decayed the moment I stopped promoting. The fourth offered recurring but at a much lower rate and with a cap on how long the commissions lasted. Global API wins on three things:
- The 8% recurring is permanent — no expiration, no cap.
- The premium tier bonus (10%) is rare in this space and rewards me for referring serious users.
- The 150+ model catalog means my referrals don't churn as fast. They're not stuck with one provider — they can switch models without leaving the platform. That keeps them on the subscription, which keeps me earning. # # # How I Promoted It Without Feeling Salesy Here's what I did, and this is the part I want you to steal. I didn't make a "10 Reasons to Sign Up for Global
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