Affiliate Roundup: Holiday Fatigue Driven by Irrelevant Offers, Influencer Codes Inflate Attribution, Google Hit With €465M Idealo Penalty, & More

This week in FMTC’s Affiliate Roundup: Shoppers are fatigued by irrelevant holiday promos, not message volume. Brands are misled by inflated “high-performing” influencer codes. Google was ordered to pay €465M to Idealo for abusing search dominance.

• A new report finds that shoppers feel fatigued not by the sheer volume of holiday messages — but by irrelevant offers, highlighting that personalized, timely communications outperform generic ones.

• Brands are being misled by “high-performing” influencer discount codes, as widespread code-scraping and voucher-site sharing are inflating sales attribution and driving significant misallocation of marketing spend.

• U.S. creator-ad spending is set to surge to $37 billion in 2025, driven by rapid AI-powered content scaling despite lingering authenticity concerns.

• The Honey lawsuit’s dismissal underscores the high legal bar for challenging browser-extension link diversion and highlights the need for clearer rules around affiliate attribution.

• A Berlin court ordered Google to pay €465 million to Idealo for abusing search dominance by favoring its own shopping service.

• With Adobe Inc. acquiring Semrush Holdings, Inc. for $1.9 billion, affiliate marketers face a paradigm shift as vast keyword and visibility data comes under one roof, raising the bar for how traffic and partner-content influence are measured in the age of generative AI.