Written by Brook Schaaf

There was a brief, amusing, and troubling interchange in Mike Mallazo’s Zero Clicks newsletter earlier this month. The back-and-forth was with interviewee Ben Grosse, Growth Leader at Profound, an AI analytics platform that helps “optimize your brand’s visibility in AI search.” 

When asked about how advertising might work on AI platforms, Grosse said, “I would expect them [OpenAI/ChatGPT] to first move towards a take rate-based commerce enablement function, which he [Sam Altman] has already hinted at.”

Mallazzo shot back: “C’mon, Ben. ‘Take rate-based commerce enablement’ function is pretty tortured language to rebrand ‘affiliate marketing’ for the Sand Hill Road crowd.”

Mallazzo didn’t press on his taunt, though perhaps he needn’t have. Grosse clearly sidestepped the term “affiliate,” even though Altman himself more than hinted at it in a March Stratechery podcast interview: “If you buy something through Deep Research that you found, we’re going to charge like a 2% affiliate fee or something.” 

This seems like the obvious play because affiliate is the second-best way for a publisher to harvest value from search intent or contextual placement. The best? Being a walled garden like Alphabet/Google or Meta/Facebook/Instagram with, respectively, approximately $350 billion and $160 billion in 2024 advertising revenue, mostly performance-based. These bidding systems allow the publisher to dazzle the advertiser, who mashes the easy button over and over and over again. But what if there are not two or three (including Amazon’s Retail Media Network) easy buttons but two or three dozen? Suddenly, the advertiser pool isn’t so easy to recreate.

Affiliate marketing should make for an obvious entry point to gain access to monetized links: tens of thousands of brands and hundreds of millions of products. Answer engines are expected to have total coverage of the web, and social media platforms might surface any random product or retailer. With the dominance of the performance-based model, you’d think affiliate would long since have been in the mix. Instead, it’s crowded out, and, as Grosse’s Dilbert-esque language shows, even unwelcome. Another unnecessary term is “outcomes-based marketing.” 

Performance-based advertising is uncontroversial, as is the concept of a revenue share. So why is it torture to bring the two together in the neatly understood, well-established phrase “affiliate marketing?” 

Here is a proposed compromise: free use and acceptance of the other terms as variations of affiliate marketing with unflinching acceptance of the core concept, similar to using the term “pre-owned” or “certified” vehicle instead of “used car.” After all, it’s not unfair that affiliate marketing as a practice should, itself, be well marketed, such that the size of the market can grow.

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