For most of the time I've run affiliate networks, one question told me almost everything I needed to know about a new affiliate: could they build a landing page and did they understand how to construct a compelling funnel? If the answer was yes, they almost certainly knew what they were doing. It was the single clearest signal we had.
The problem with that signal was never the people who failed it because they didn't understand marketing. It was the people who failed it because they understood marketing perfectly well and simply didn't have the technical chops to build a funnel or the money to pay someone who did. Affiliate marketing was bifurcated along that line for years – not between the competent and the incompetent, but between the competent who could produce and the competent who couldn't afford to.
AI collapsed that line. And from where I sit, running networks that onboard new affiliates every single day, the result is something I'd call a boom: a large pool of people who always understood this business finally being able to run in it.
What I'm seeing from inside the network
Let me put numbers on it, because "boom" is a word people throw around. On one of our networks, new affiliate signups through late August have roughly doubled compared with the same stretch of last year, and the pace has picked up sharply through the summer – the last eight weeks alone ran at more than twice last year's rate, and in August we were onboarding about three new affiliates a day. Every one of those comes through an inbound or outbound channel, gets filtered to an affiliate manager for vetting, and is approved and launched on offers our sales team signs.
The other side of the marketplace is moving too. New advertisers launching on that same network are up roughly 60% year over year and have more than doubled versus two years ago. More supply on one side, more demand on the other, in the same twelve months. That is not a coincidence, and it is not a fluke of our sales team having a good year. There are four things happening at once, and AI is underneath every one of them.
1. The funnel stopped being a gate
This is the one I opened with, and it's the most visible. A landing page and a set of creatives used to require either real technical skill or real money – the individual affiliate either had the chops or paid an outsourced specialist who did. That cost kept the field small and kept the range of offers any one affiliate could attempt narrow, because every new angle meant another build.
Today anyone can produce a landing page and a creative in the time it takes to describe what they want. The production cost of testing an idea went to nearly nothing, so people test more ideas. The affiliates I talk to now are high-agency operators running wider and faster, spinning up campaigns they would never have been equipped to build on their own three years ago. Understanding the market is once again the thing that matters, and understanding alone now gets you in the door.
2. The tooling tax disappeared
The less visible barrier was the monthly software bill. Serious affiliate marketing requires tracking and reporting – knowing which click became which conversion, which source is profitable, where to cut and where to scale. The commercial platforms that do this well typically run somewhere in the range of $500 to $1,500 a month, and for a new affiliate that is a real tax paid before the first dollar of profit.
What I'm seeing more and more is affiliates building their own. Simple, homegrown tracking and reporting systems, written with AI, that do exactly what that particular affiliate needs and nothing more. They aren't as polished as the commercial tools and they don't need to be. They remove a recurring cost that used to sit between a competent marketer and a viable business, and they do it in an afternoon.
3. Targeting came back, and it rewards creative volume
This one takes a little history, because a lot of people in this business remember the pain and not the recovery.
Facebook's targeting advantage started eroding in 2018, when it shut down Partner Categories and cut advertisers off from third-party data. Apple's App Tracking Transparency in April 2021 made the signal loss structural, and in January 2022 Meta removed thousands of detailed targeting options outright. For several years, precise targeting on the platform where most affiliates buy media simply got harder. Media buying became a grind of working around lost signal.
That has reversed, and AI is the reason. Meta launched Advantage+ shopping campaigns in August 2022, letting the system test up to 150 creative combinations at once and find the audience itself. By mid-2025, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Meta intends to let advertisers fully automate ad creation and targeting by the end of 2026. The machine now does the targeting. What the buyer controls is the creative – its quality and, just as important, its quantity, because the system needs volume to test against.
Put that next to the first driver and you see why it matters so much for affiliates. Media buying is now a creative-volume game, and AI made creative volume nearly free. A solo affiliate can feed an AI-driven campaign the range of creative it needs to find its audience, which three years ago would have taken a design team. The most technically demanding channel in affiliate marketing just became one of the most accessible.
4. Advertisers want the channel more than they used to
The supply side is only half of it. Advertisers are pulling affiliates in, and they're doing it because the channel's economics look better every year against everything else they could spend on.
The affiliate channel is lower risk than almost any alternative, and the reason is structural: the affiliate shares the burden of that risk. When an internal team or a traditional agency runs a campaign, the advertiser carries all of the downside – salaries, media, and tooling get spent whether or not the campaign converts. When an affiliate runs it, the affiliate fronts the media and the effort and only gets paid on the outcome. That makes the affiliate incentivized for profit in a way an internal team on salary never quite is. I laid out the broader case for why outcome-based channels hold up as measurement gets harder everywhere else; the short version is that a tracked network conversion is a clean, directly attributable event, and in an attribution environment that keeps degrading, that is worth a premium.
More advertisers signing on means more offers, and more offers give a new affiliate a wider surface to find something that works. The two sides feed each other. That's what a boom in a marketplace looks like from the inside.
What more affiliates actually means
None of this is a threat to the business. It is the best thing that has happened to it in a decade. But it changes the job – for affiliates and for networks.
For affiliates, when everyone can build a funnel and everyone can feed a campaign creative, more people are competing on the same offers. The undifferentiated ones get squeezed. What separates the winners is no longer production; it's judgment. Which offer, which angle, which audience, and the discipline to read the data and act on it. Production became free. Discernment became the whole game.
For networks, our vetting question has to change with it. "Can you build a page" is worthless now. The question that replaces it is "do you know what you're doing" – and that is harder to assess, more important to get right, and squarely the job of a good affiliate manager. The value a network adds shifts toward exactly what AI can't do for a new affiliate: qualifying them honestly, matching them to offers that fit, and giving them the operational knowledge to turn a test into something that scales.
And it clarifies what a network actually competes on when the funnel is free. We've been building ours since 2012 – more than $250 million paid out to affiliates, over 1,500 advertisers, more than 30,000 affiliates – and that network, and the process knowledge that comes from running it, is the part no model hands to a competitor. The same dynamic is playing out inside our own operation, where a small team now does department-scale work with AI, but that is a story for another post.
The takeaway
Affiliate marketing is growing because AI took away the creative costs, the tooling tax, and the targeting grind – and at the same moment advertisers decided the channel's risk-sharing economics are exactly what they want. That is why we're onboarding affiliates at the pace we are, and why the advertisers keep coming with them.
If you're an affiliate, this is the best entry point the industry has offered in years – and your edge is not going to be the tools everyone now has, it's how well you think. A lot of the people coming in right now are not new to marketing. They may have looked at affiliate before and turned away because the complexities and the costs made it impractical. Both of those are now near zero. The channel is more accessible than it has ever been, the advertiser demand is there, and the affiliates who win from here will be the ones who bring real judgment to it.