Written by Brook Schaaf

When I think of affiliate marketing in 2025, the first word that comes to mind is “suspense.” So much has changed, seemingly in permanent ways, but the turmoil continues without resolving into a clear picture of the new normal. Let’s consider two questions as we look toward 2026, waiting for the other shoe to drop:

  • What will happen to established affiliate traffic and attribution/monetization pathways?
  • Will channel convergence come? If so, what will and will not (can and cannot) converge? 

As Digiday put it, “If publishers had one Christmas wish, it’d be for the chaos to end.” While they’re speaking of the more traditional display- and subscription-based digital publishing world, the same sentiment holds true for affiliate sites, many of which now share parent companies. 

The traffic drop because of AI answers and overviews is grim for many. To take just one example, the Daily Mail estimated last month that AI Overviews result in average click-through rates “80–90% lower.” Interestingly, AIOs aren’t triggered for many keywords critical to them, including breaking news, so their situation isn’t dire. They have a lot of direct traffic, though many who don’t (didn’t) have scaled back or even shut down as early as last year. Converting clicks—and even page views—into spend-justifying metrics are dependent on traffic, or at least they have been.  

This may need to change. Partnerize, utilizing what I understand to be technology from its Konnecto acquisition, has been touting its “2025 Clickless Affiliation Index Report,” which found that “publishers drive conversions at an average 2.06x higher rate than last-click-based attribution models.” This may sound crazy, but I actually find it quite believable based on my research into other marketing channels for my forthcoming book. One reason Meta and Alphabet generate so very much revenue is because they grade their own homework, putting them in an enviable position to oversell. If the Partnerize number is based on similar or at least similarly defensible logic of touchpoints and view-throughs, then the affiliate channel should already be multiples larger. This would probably be doubly true again if commerce content’s contribution to inference were fully counted. 

This points toward the need for some new metric or harmonization of multiple metrics to better account for contributions at each stage of the sales funnel, compressed or not, i.e., the “best” running shoe is displayed alongside coupons for the same in a search engine, prompting the shopper to buy later… on a different device. Without content, there can be no inference or search results. Thus, the AI companies must come to some kind of understanding with the content creators, which will represent its own type of convergence—and one for which a new kind of attribution is likely to emerge.

This is easier said than done, sure, but channel convergence could take us a great big step in this direction. (Or away, if affiliate is tracked via MMM.) The idea is that the financial-market-like liquidity of advertising within walled gardens (think Performance Max, Performance+, or Advantage+) could extend past or across those walled gardens, as we’re beginning to see with certain affiliate technologies (like tvScientific, just acquired by Pinterest). To converge, then, is the possibility of accessing different ad formats on different publishers on different compensation bases. 

In particular, we’re seeing this with the creator space, which is already a near-perfect confluence: creators mostly publish within walled gardens and may be compensated directly on an affiliate, non-affiliate, or hybrid basis. Moreover, they can earn revenue sharing from the hosting platform’s ads. 

The IAB just published a helpful report, estimating that $9.6B of $37.1B in 2025 was “direct partnerships,” which I assume includes some affiliate compensation. The rest went to the platforms in the form of ads and amplification. While still a minority share, this augers well for our channel. As Walt Roloson of Capital One Shopping shared with me, “Creator may save affiliate.” By this, he means, I think, that the future growth of the creator space is unconstrained, and it will carry affiliate along with it.

And that is certainly something to look forward to next year as we wrap up a long, eventful 2025. I hope yours has been a good one. In our household, we welcomed our fourth child. At FMTC, we finally turned off our legacy systems, giving us a new foundation upon which to build and integrate—including, very appropriately for this topic, the creator discovery platform Affistash.

We’ll be dark next week. I hope you have a joyous Christmas season and a wonderful New Year. I’ll look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas in just a few weeks at Affiliate Summit West.

The post Thoughts on 2025 appeared first on FMTC.