Expert strategy guides for scaling affiliate revenue, optimizing commission structures, improving incrementality measurement, and growing your performance marketing program.
The Affiliate Leaders Awards 2026 recognized companies and executives across 20 categories. The winning patterns reveal where the industry is placing its bets—and where program managers should be paying attention.
Capital One's settlement with content creators over an affiliate marketing dispute sets a new precedent. Here's what every program manager needs to understand before their next creator contract.
Clarks is restructuring its affiliate program to center influencer partnerships, a move that signals a broader shift in how heritage retail brands are rethinking partner mix and commission architecture.
Brands are getting serious about affiliate budget leakage, pulling in finance and analytics teams to scrutinize where performance dollars actually go. Here's what that means for program managers.
AI is restructuring how affiliate programs price, recruit, and optimize. Program managers who don't adapt their commission logic and partner mix now will find themselves outmaneuvered by those who do.
Contract for Difference trading affiliate programs are intensifying commission competition in 2026, with demand trends reshaping how brokers recruit and retain publishers. Here's what performance marketers need to know.
Brands are waking up to how broken attribution is bleeding affiliate budgets dry. Vogue Business and Digiday both surfaced the same problem this week: most programs can't see what's actually driving conversions.
Klook just expanded creator access to its single-link affiliate tool, compressing the friction between content and conversion for travel publishers. Here's what that architecture means for how you build your own creator affiliate program.
Affiliates bidding on your brand keywords are quietly cannibalizing sales you'd have captured anyway. Here's how to detect it and stop paying commissions on traffic that was already yours.
Target's deepened partnership with LTK signals a structural shift in how major retailers architect affiliate. For program managers, the implications go well beyond retail.
B2B companies are sitting on an underused affiliate channel while pouring budget into paid search and content. The structures that work in consumer programs don't translate directly—here's what does.
Travel brands are shifting affiliate budgets from big-follower creators to smaller ones who can prove they convert. For affiliate program managers, this changes how you recruit, tier, and pay.
Substack writers are converting affiliate links at rates that outpace most influencer channels—yet few programs have a recruitment strategy for them. Here's why that gap is closing fast.
iGaming affiliates are leaving real money on the table by ignoring payment friction at checkout. The deposit method a casino offers—or withholds—can swing conversion rates by double digits.
Most affiliate programs lose 40-60% of recruited partners to inactivity within 12 months. A structured re-engagement campaign can recover 15-25% of those dormant affiliates—without recruiting a single new one.
The FIFA World Cup is running across the US, Canada, and Mexico right now—and iGaming affiliate programs are sitting on one of the biggest traffic surges in years. Here's how to act before the knockout rounds end.
Phia, the Gates-family-backed health benefits app, stands accused of cookie stuffing—claiming affiliate credit on purchases it never influenced. Here's what every program manager should audit today.
New research confirms YouTube affiliate marketing is booming while FTC disclosure compliance lags badly. Program managers whose affiliates skip proper disclosures carry real legal and reputational exposure.
Binance just restructured its affiliate program around a new welcome bonus incentive. The move reveals a broader shift in how high-competition verticals are using entry-point offers to lock in affiliate loyalty.
Rakuten's Mirai AI agent can optimize bids, placements, and partner mixes autonomously. That raises a pointed question for program managers: which decisions should machines never own?
Affiliate Summit West 2026 surfaced three structural shifts reshaping how programs recruit, compensate, and measure partners. Here's what the floor conversations actually mean for your program.
Anonymous content creators—running niche YouTube channels, Pinterest boards, and faceless TikTok accounts—are outranking brand-name influencers in affiliate revenue. Here's what that means for how you recruit and compensate.
YouTube just dropped its Shopping affiliate threshold to 500 subscribers, opening a massive untapped creator pool. Here's what affiliate program managers need to know before their competitors act.
Coupon and deal publishers are driving a disproportionate share of affiliate revenue in 2026, per eMarketer. Program managers who dismissed them after cookie-stuffing scandals may be leaving their best converters benched.
New eMarketer data confirms financial institutions are chronically underinvested in affiliate. For program managers in adjacent verticals, that gap is a direct opportunity.
Target shuttered its creator affiliate program, leaving thousands of influencers scrambling. For affiliate managers at competing retailers, this is a recruiting window—and a warning.
New Prohaska Consulting research confirms what affiliate managers have suspected for years: marketing mix models are systematically undervaluing affiliate's contribution. Here's what to do about it.
Macy's is routing Style Crew affiliate traffic through editorial placements and loyalty touchpoints, not just Instagram posts. Here's what that architecture means for retail affiliate managers.
How affiliate managers can recruit earlier, secure better partner exposure, structure holiday incentives, protect attribution, and keep the program productive through the busiest shopping weeks.
Generative AI is the most disruptive force affiliate marketing has faced since the rise of ad blockers. Shopping-related queries on ChatGPT grew faster than any other query type between late 2024 and mid-2025, and the trajectory has only accelerated into 2026. When a consumer gets a product recommendation inside an AI chatbot rather than clicking a publisher's link, the attribution mechanism that the entire affiliate model depends on simply breaks.
US advertisers will spend $13.81 billion on affiliate marketing in 2026 — up 11.3% from $12.42 billion in 2025 — a growth rate nearly twice that of overall US retail ecommerce at 6.7%. The affiliate channel will drive an estimated $241 billion in US ecommerce sales this year, cementing its position not as a niche tactic but as core infrastructure for digital commerce.
The deprecation of third-party cookies is no longer a future concern — it is an operational reality reshaping how affiliate programs track, attribute, and pay their publishers in 2026. Combined with iOS Intelligent Tracking Prevention, aggressive ad blockers, and the rise of AI-driven browsing that bypasses click-through entirely, traditional browser-based affiliate tracking has become structurally unreliable.
Finding the right digital marketing consultant can be the difference between a stagnant ad program and a compounding growth engine. Whether you're managing paid search, paid social, affiliate, or programmatic channels, a seasoned consultant brings cross-channel perspective and a speed of iteration that in-house teams often cannot match.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most efficient channels in the modern growth stack. But most brands either never get it off the ground or waste time and budget with the wrong approach. The key to scaling affiliate revenue is not doing more — it's doing the right things with the right partners. If you're ready to scale, start with your data, not your instincts.
Integrating LinkedIn Ads with your marketing automation tools can significantly enhance your lead generation and nurturing processes. This comprehensive guide explores the benefits, strategies, and step-by-step processes for effectively combining LinkedIn Ads with popular marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot.
Most affiliate program benchmarking fails because it reaches for invented industry averages instead of building a measurement system against the program's own history. This scorecard defines 13 concrete metrics — how to calculate each, why it matters, and which direction to move it — drawn from practitioner experience and primary sources including the Impact.com 2025 Partnership Economy Research and FTC endorsement guidance.
From our publisher · Sponsored · Disclosure
CostPerNews is published by the team behind two affiliate-industry businesses built for brands, advertisers, and affiliate managers.
Affiliate Program Management Agency
Experience Advertising is a full-service affiliate program management (OPM) agency founded by Evan Weber in 2007. The team launches, manages, and grows affiliate programs on CJ Affiliate, Impact, Awin, ShareASale, Rakuten, Everflow, TUNE, and PartnerStack — with hands-on publisher recruiting as the core of every engagement.
Talk to Experience Advertising → experienceadvertising.com
Affiliate Discovery Software
AffiliateFinders is a searchable directory and discovery platform for affiliate managers. It surfaces active content affiliates, review sites, coupon and loyalty publishers, newsletters, and creators across hundreds of verticals so brand teams can build a recruiting pipeline in minutes instead of weeks.
Search AffiliateFinders → affiliatefinders.com