The next big wave may be coming. Affiliate marketing isn’t quite in position to surf it.

Written by Brook Schaaf

Catching the right wave is the hardest part of surfing, even more than paddling out. For unskilled surfers like me, this is why working with a coach in the water is so very nice — they keep an eye on the emerging wave and even give you a push right into that magical feeling of uplift when your board is with the wave. 

It seems to me that we affiliate marketers are starting to see a great big swell forming in the distance, and we had best keep our eye on it. 

Last week it was widely reported that the Department of Justice may propose a breakup of Google as a remedy for the first antitrust trial, in which a judge ruled the company’s search business constituted an illegal monopoly. (The outcome of the second antitrust trial related to its ad tech business is pending.)

While such a breakup, should it ever even happen, would be years away and would not necessarily diminish the reach of Google’s search product, it does feel that change is in the air. We may well be looking at a re-fracturing of the search market (remember the many directories in days of yore?). It’s not just Perplexity.ai, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and SearchGPT; it’s not just TikTok and Meta; it’s not just Reddit and Apple — it’s any number of web properties large and small that will, by every anticipation, soon be able — or forced — to tap into advertising dollars related to commercially relevant search queries. 

Assuming this comes to pass, just how fractured will the associated advertising ecosystem be? Undoubtedly, it is best for the publisher to have a proprietary ad network inside its very own walled garden. This is what Alphabet (Google, YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), and Amazon have. But it’s not so easy to get this critical mass, least of all when there are countless long-tail keywords, especially if there are a half dozen to a dozen serious competitors. 

This is where affiliate marketing can shine, but it has to prove its value against a walled garden distributing its links, which Bing already does, and the emergent fiefdoms. Affiliate marketing is not quite in position. Our long (tail?) board is seaworthy; tracking is sophisticated and tens of thousands of merchants are integrated — but we are a ways away from where we’ll need to be. It will be a tough paddle out and we won’t have a coach to tell us when or to give us a push. We’ll have to do it ourselves. 

The wave is coming. Let’s make sure we’re ready to ride it. 

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