Affiliate marketing is 25 years old and hasn't budged

Affiliate marketing was a simple promise: pay the media that bring you customers.

Hard to find a healthier model. No risk, no budget committed blindly, compensation strictly tied to results. At the end of the 1990s, it was a revolution.

Twenty-five years later, the model has barely moved.

What it is, and what it represents

Let’s review the basics. A publisher (website, blog, comparison site, creator) places a tracked link to a merchant. A user clicks, buys, and the publisher earns a commission. The link is identified by a cookie that attributes the sale.

The affiliate marketing market represents roughly 17 billion dollars today [1]. Alongside it, cashback and referral account for 11 billion [1], and the creator economy represents 250 billion, with a projection to 480 billion in 2027 [1].

Look closely at these three orders of magnitude. They tell a story: the oldest and most measurable model is also, by far, the smallest.

Where it started to break down

Four friction points, accumulated over a quarter of a century.

1. A closed door

Affiliate marketing is reserved for professionals [1]. You need a website, an audience, an application, sometimes manual approval. A satisfied customer simply has no access to it, even if they generate more sales than the average affiliate.

The setup was designed for publishers, at a time when only publishers could drive traffic. That assumption has been false for fifteen years.

2. Volume at all costs

The industry’s reflex has long been to stack affiliates. Thousands of passive partners, zero transparency on the value actually created, and a structural dependence on intermediary platforms.

The result is a blur between partners who create value and players who merely capture attribution at the end of the journey.

3. Collapsing attribution

The entire model relies on third-party cookies. With the end of cookies, browser protections, and multi-device fragmentation, last-click attribution becomes a convenient fiction.

Brands keep paying based on a signal that barely measures anything anymore.

4. Zero relationship

The affiliate doesn’t know the brand. The brand doesn’t know the affiliate. Neither knows the buyer. A transaction among three strangers, with no actionable data for anyone.

The verdict from a market that knows it

Coming out of the latest Affiliate Summit West, the takeaway was hard to avoid, even if many still refuse to admit it: affiliate marketing is dead.

Not because it no longer works. Because it no longer aligns with real-world habits.

Three takeaways from this edition.

Affiliate marketing is no longer a channel, it’s a system. AI, post-cookie attribution, automation: performance no longer relies on links, but on intelligent recommendation and trust mechanics.

The future of affiliate marketing is individuals, not platforms. Creators, customers, communities: those who recommend are finally recognized as the real business entry points. And they want three very simple things: to understand, to be paid clearly, and to stay in control of their relationship.

The ‘volume at all costs’ model is over. Nobody believes in it anymore. And frankly, how could anyone believe in it for so long?

What comes next

Tomorrow’s affiliate marketing will be frictionless, focused on direct relationships, measurable, and aligned with the creator economy and real word-of-mouth.

In concrete terms, that means four changes:

	Traditional affiliate marketing	What’s coming
Access	Approved professionals	Open to everyone, in two clicks
Attribution	Third-party cookie, last click	Native tracking, cookie-free
Payout	Deferred commission, thresholds, monthly transfers	Instant cash
Relationship	Intermediated by the platform	Direct, data owned by the brand

The most defining point is the first one. Opening the system to everyone, one-off customers, loyal customers, creators, and even your customers’ close circles, changes the nature of the lever. We are no longer talking about a network of a few thousand publishers, but a network potentially as wide as your customer base and its circles.

This is exactly what the Frak approach brings together: affiliate marketing, but open to everyone in peer-to-peer, paired with referral, reaching the communities of all brands with cash rewards [1].

The right question

What if we stopped ‘doing affiliate marketing’ to finally think of recommendation as a scalable, trackable, and human acquisition engine?

Affiliate marketing was right in principle: pay what brings in customers. It was simply wrong about who actually brings them in.

They aren’t just media. They are people. See From the Creator Economy to the Recommendation Economy.

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I am Virginie Maire, co-founder of Frak Labs, which turns your customers into a scalable, profitable, and authentic acquisition channel. A committed entrepreneur and mother of two, I’ve spent 20 years navigating media, social networks, influence, and e-commerce… and I’m still having just as much fun!