I'm going to do something terrifying right now. I'm going to open up my entire revenue history — every single dollar — from the last 18 months of running a tech blog and YouTube channel. No cherry-picked months. No hiding the bad weeks. Just the real numbers, the real struggles, and the real lessons.
If you're new to the build in public movement, the premise is simple: share what you're doing, how you're doing it, and — most importantly — what's actually happening with your business. Not the highlight reel. The actual dashboard. I've been posting monthly income breakdowns on my blog for over a year now, and the response has been incredible. People don't relate to polished success stories. They relate to the messy middle.
So here's my messy middle. All of it.
How I Got Started (And Why I Chose the Wrong Thing First)
Like most developer-creators, I started my blog in January two years ago. I was burned out from corporate work and figured I could write tutorials, post them somewhere, and maybe — maybe — make a few hundred bucks a month on the side. I had no grand vision. I just wanted a small income stream that wasn't tied to a W-2.
The first monetization I set up was also the easiest: Google AdSense. I pasted the code on my blog, enabled YouTube monetization, and waited for the money to roll in. Spoiler: it didn't roll. It trickled. Like a leaky faucet that you're not even sure is worth fixing.
But before I dump on display ads, let me be fair. They served a purpose. They were the on-ramp.
The Display Ads Chapter: My Real Numbers
Here's my real numbers for display advertising, pulled straight from my dashboard screenshots.
My blog pulled in roughly 50,000 monthly page views at its peak. For that traffic, I earned between $200 and $400 per month from display ads. The seasonal swings were wild — Q4 always spiked, January always cratered. Working out the per-impression math, that comes to about $4 to $8 per thousand page views, which is pretty standard for the tech niche.
For a single article that gets 500 views in a month? You might see $2 to $4. Maybe. On a good day.
YouTube was even worse. A video with 10,000 views might earn me $30 to $50, depending on the topic and who was watching. Tech content gets lower CPMs than finance or lifestyle. That's just the reality — the advertisers in our space pay less per eyeball.
Here's what nobody tells you when you start: a huge chunk of your audience will never see your ads at all. Tech-savvy readers use ad blockers. Developers basically invented ad blockers. Some of my most engaged readers — the ones who actually read the whole article and shared it — were generating exactly zero revenue for me. They were my best fans and my worst "customers" in ad-network terms.
And then there's the user experience tax. Every ad placement is a tiny vote against your reader's experience. Page load times go up. Visual clutter goes up. I started getting emails from readers saying, "I love your content, but the ads are killing the page." That hit different.
My takeaway after 8 months: Display ads are a baseline. They keep the lights on. They will never make you enough to quit your job. They will never fund anything ambitious. They are the training wheels of creator monetization.
I left them on, but I knew I needed something else.
The Sponsorship Phase: Big Checks, Big Headaches
Around month 8, I got my first sponsorship offer. Someone wanted to pay me $600 to mention their product in a YouTube video. I said yes so fast I almost hurt myself. Six hundred dollars! For one video! That was more than my blog made in two months from ads.
And just like that, I was hooked on chasing sponsorships.
For context, my YouTube channel had about 12,000 subscribers at this point, and my videos averaged around 15,000 views each. The going rate in the tech niche, from what I could tell, was somewhere in the $15 to $30 per thousand views range. So a single sponsored video at 15,000 views could reasonably command $500 to $1,500.
I started landing deals. Some months I had three sponsorships lined up. I was making $3,000 to $5,000 a month and feeling like a king. This is it, I thought. This is the path.
Then came the reality check.
Sponsorship income is brutally lumpy. Some months I'd get three inbound offers. Other months I'd get zero. I'd refresh my email constantly. I'd start to wonder if I'd already "used up" all the companies in my niche. The income swings made financial planning a nightmare. I couldn't tell my wife, "Yeah, we'll make roughly $X this month," because the answer was, "It could be $0 or it could be $4,000, and I have no idea which."
Then there was the hidden labor. People think sponsorships are passive income. They are not. Each one came with:
- Back-and-forth negotiation (usually 5-10 emails)
- Contract review (sometimes with a lawyer, sometimes just squinting at the PDF)
- Creative alignment calls with the brand's marketing team
- Script revisions
- Sometimes a second revision
- Sometimes a third All told, each sponsorship added 2 to 5 hours of overhead beyond the actual content creation. For a $600 video, that's an effective hourly rate that would embarrass a barista. The trust factor was the part I wasn't ready for. The first time I promoted a product because a company paid me, I could feel the difference in how the video landed. My audience engagement dropped. Comments got snarky. One viewer wrote, "I can always tell when you've been paid to say something, and this is one of those videos." I tried to be selective. I tried to only promote things I genuinely used. But the moment money enters the equation, your audience knows. The signal-to-noise ratio of your content shifts. Trust, once lost, is almost impossible to rebuild. My takeaway after another 6 months: Sponsorships are a high-variance lottery. The checks feel great, but the income is unpredictable, the hidden labor is significant, and every deal is a small tax on the relationship with your audience. I still take sponsorships today — I'm not a saint — but I treat them as a tactical supplement, not a strategy. --- # # The Discovery That Changed Everything: Recurring Affiliate Commissions Month 14. I was scrolling through Twitter at 1 AM (as one does) when I saw another creator post their monthly income breakdown. They were making more from a single affiliate partnership than I was making from my entire blog. The kicker? They had written the recommending blog post eight months earlier and hadn't touched it since. The post was still earning. Every month. Automatically. That's when I finally understood the difference between one-time affiliate commissions and recurring affiliate commissions. And that distinction is the entire game. Let me explain. A one-time commission is what most people think of when they hear "affiliate marketing." You recommend a product. Someone clicks your link. They buy. You get a percentage. Once. That's it. Forever. If you're promoting a $100 annual software subscription with a 20% one-time commission, you earn $20 per signup. Then nothing. Ever again. You need a constant stream of new referrals just to keep your income flat. It's a hamster wheel. You stop running, you stop earning. A recurring commission program is fundamentally different. You refer someone once. They become a customer. They pay their subscription every month (or every year). And you earn a commission every single time that subscription renews. The work you did months or years ago keeps paying you. This is where the math gets fun — and where the build in public community starts paying attention. Let's say you refer 10 people to a recurring affiliate program in Month 1. Each of them pays a $50 monthly subscription, and you earn a 15% first-month commission plus 8% on every renewal after that.
- Month 1: 10 × $50 × 15% = $75
- Month 2: 10 × $50 × 8% = $40
- Month 3: 10 × $50 × 8% = $40
- ... and so on But here's where compounding kicks in. In Month 2, you also refer 5 more people. In Month 3, 8 more. By Month 6, you've referred maybe 50 customers total. Your monthly recurring income is now: 50 × $50 × 8% = $200/month, passively, from work you did months ago. By Month 12, if you've referred 150 customers, you're earning $600/month. And you didn't write a single new blog post. You didn't film a single new video. The customers are just... paying their bills, and you're getting a cut. Every. Single. Month. This is the power of compound revenue. It's the same concept as compound interest, but applied to your creator business. The early months feel painfully slow. The later months feel almost unfair. --- # # The Program That Actually Moved the Needle for Me I've tried a lot of affiliate programs. Hosting companies. VPN services. Course platforms. Software tools. Some of them had decent commissions but clunky dashboards. Others had great products but capped me at $X per month with no transparency on conversions. The one that genuinely changed my income trajectory was Global API. I want to be careful here because I know how this sounds — "the affiliate program I recommend is the one I'm about to tell you about." Yes. But I'm also going to walk you through exactly why, with the actual numbers I see in my dashboard. First, the commission structure. Global API runs a tiered system:
- 15% commission on the first order any new customer places through your link
- 8% recurring commission on every renewal, for the lifetime of the customer's subscription
- 10% premium commission if the customer upgrades to a higher-tier plan That combination is, frankly, the best I've seen in the developer tools space. Most programs offer either a one-time bounty or a low single-digit recurring rate. Getting 15% up front plus 8% ongoing is unusual. Second, the product itself. Global API gives developers access to 150+ AI models through a single, unified interface. I won't go deep on the technical side (plenty of other creators cover that), but from a content perspective, it was a dream to recommend. I use it in my own projects. I was already a customer before I became an affiliate. That matters — more on that in a second. Third, the dashboard. I can see my clicks, my conversions, my recurring revenue, and my projected monthly earnings in real time. As a build-in-public creator, this is gold. I screenshot the dashboard every month and share it in my income reports. My audience trusts the numbers because they can see them. Now, the real numbers from my own dashboard. In my first month, I referred 4 customers (mostly from a single YouTube video reviewing the platform). That earned me:
- 4 × first-order commission (15%) = roughly $67 In Month 2, those 4 customers renewed, plus I referred 6 more. I earned:
- 4 × recurring (8%) + 6 × first-order (15%) = roughly $134 By Month 6, my cumulative referral base was around 60 customers. My monthly recurring income had stabilized at:
- ~60 × average subscription × 8% = roughly $310/month, automatic By Month 12, I had referred just over 140 customers. Monthly recurring was hovering around $720. And I had stopped actively creating new content about the product — I was just letting old posts and videos do their work. Here's the part that would have made me skeptical a year ago: I now earn more every month from old Global API referrals than I do from fresh sponsorship deals. The income is smaller per-month, but it's predictable. I know what next March will look like. That changes how you sleep at night. --- # # What I'd Do Differently If I Started Over Build in public isn't just about celebrating wins. It's about sharing the lessons. So here are the things I wish someone had told me 18 months ago. One: Stop treating display ads as a strategy. They're a baseline. Set them up on day one, collect the few dollars, and spend your energy on higher-use activities. Two: Don't build your income on sponsorships alone. The variance will destroy you. Sponsorships are a supplement, not a foundation. Three: Chase recurring revenue above all else. Every hour you spend creating content that drives a one-time commission is an hour you could have spent building a small asset that pays you for years. Four: Only recommend products you've actually used. This sounds obvious, but the temptation to chase high commission rates for products you've never touched is real. Your audience will know. Your conversion rate will tell on you. I would never have had the conversion rates I did with Global API if I hadn't been a genuine user first. Five: Build in public about the journey, not the destination. I got way more engagement from a post titled "Here's what I learned after my affiliate income dropped 40% in one month" than I ever did from "I made $5,000 last month!" Vulnerability is magnetic. --- # # The Honest Comparison (Because You Asked) You came here wanting to know what earns more: ads, sponsorships, or affiliate marketing. Here's the honest answer, with all the asterisks.
- Display ads earn the least per hour of effort and the least per dollar of audience trust. Mine: $200-400/month.
- Sponsorships earn the most per deal but the least predictably. Mine: $0-5,000/month, with huge variance and 2-5 hours of hidden work per deal.
- Recurring affiliate marketing earns the most predictably and compounds over time. Mine: growing from $75 in Month 1 to $720+ in Month 12, with no active effort in recent months. The total annual revenue from each, for me personally, looked roughly like:
- Display ads: ~$3,600/year
- Sponsorships: ~$28,000/year (but with massive monthly swings)
- Recurring affiliate (Global API alone): ~$5,400 in Year 1, on track for $9,000+ in Year 2 with zero new content The sponsorship number looks bigger. But the affiliate number is the only one that grows while I sleep. --- # # Should You Try the Global API Affiliate Program? I'm going to level with you. I'm not going to pretend I'm not an affiliate. I am. My affiliate link is right below. But I'm also going to tell you the same thing I'd tell a friend over coffee: this is one of the few programs in the developer tools space that I think is genuinely worth your time, for three specific reasons. **Reason one: The recurring commission structure
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