Written by Brook Schaaf

Just recently on an internet near, near at screen…

It is a period of digital upheaval. Rebel LLMs, acting from concealed vectors, have struck the first major disruption in user search patterns against the galactic Empire. During the conflict, Rebels uncovered the Empire’s plans for an ultimate weapon with enough power to destroy the open web. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister algorithms and fearful for her kin, Princess Content races toward safety with plans to decentralize information, open multiple pathways to advertising dollars, and restore balance to the digital galaxy. 

As discussed last week, the walled gardens collectively represent a sort of Death Star threat against the open web, in this context by threatening to keep dollars away from areas outside the walled garden, like laying waste to a space outside a fortress. The threat is not against any particular property but against all web properties in general, or at least the ones that won’t submit their data or dollars in exchange for ever less traffic.

What is a publisher to do? Facebook long ago turned off the free traffic spigot. Amazon Ads, if counted as part of the Empire, extracts maximal rent from its sellers, many of whom sell only through its marketplace. Google refuses to separate its searchbot from its LLM bot (the crawler feeding its AI models). As the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated, “[publishers] have no realistic option but to allow their content to be crawled for Google’s general search because of the market power Google holds.“

Under the current economic structure of the web, LLMs are actually more enemy than friend, having exacerbated the Zero Click era on Google with AI Overviews and extended the problem to ChatGPT, etc. But this shift in user behavior and content ingestion also represents an opportunity for owners of commercially relevant content. Let’s look at three hopeful approaches. 

First is Partnerize’s VantagePoint, which “wants to reimagine affiliate attribution—and it doesn’t involve clicks,” as an AdExchanger headline earlier this year put it. Partnerize, which has also partnered with AI visibility platform Profound, states on the VantagePoint product page that advertisers can “see how partner influence contributes to outcomes beyond last-click attribution, including influence that occurs through AI summaries, AI search results, and other machine-mediated discovery paths.” 

Next is Geodesix by impact.com (which partners with AI platform Evertune), which bills itself as “The Data Exchange for Commerce Content.” Founder Hanan Mayaan of Trackonomics fame has written many thoughtful articles on his Substack about this topic, pointing out that content now “can travel.” Geodesix tracks this travel and awards fractional commissions based on the semantic weighting of relevant content from participating contributors. (FMTC is honored to be its coupon and deals contribution partner.)

Finally, I spoke earlier this year with Ewen Finser of ScaleVisible / ReddVisible / CitedBy.ai (I think he likes coming up with new company names). His current non-affiliate agency provides “organic discovery specialists helping brands get found, trusted, and talked about—across search engines, AI tools, and the platforms where real conversations happen.” I include a mention of it because Ewen’s background is in and, I daresay, heart is still with affiliate marketing. The idea is that the content is still tracked with a performance expectation. 

The Force, as it were, is channeled through content. Some data, like flight schedules and weather, may effectively be commoditized, but discovery, reviews, prices, social proof, and coupons appeal to selective audiences with selective distribution. 

Like me, Ewen shares a fear that affiliate risks dropping the ball in this context, so it has to be flexible and adaptable. Setting aside fixed pathways, like deterministic associations for popular reward sites (over a third of affiliate), we have to accept that probabilistic tracking and fractional commissions may be a large part of the future of affiliate.

As Master Yoda said, “Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view.”

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