Making a Living Online: The Affiliate Link Boom and Bust
How the affiliate model worked, and then didn't, and turned the internet into one big SkyMall
Welcome back to my series on our history of making a living online. My aim with this series is to offer a behind-the-scenes tour of how the online economy has and does work, which also provides a fascinating window into how and why the internet has changed and looks the way it does today.
In the last installment, I walked you through our experience with banner ads and how the online ad ecosystem changed in ways that pretty much eliminated them as a significant source of revenue.
Today, I want to talk about another major source of revenue for AoM over the years: affiliate links.
So much has changed about the world of affiliate links over the years that I had trouble remembering how, why, and when things went down. To jog my memory and help me flesh out the history of the affiliate link in online publishing, I chatted with fellow men’s lifestyle publisher Brandon Wenerd. Brandon co-founded BroBible back in 2009, a year after I started AoM, and like me, he’s spent the past 17 years navigating the online arena as an indie operator.
AoM’s history with affiliate revenue pretty much mirrors BroBible’s: started off as a great source of revenue, then stopped working. Brandon and I also observed how the affiliate model got abused along the way and made the online experience worse for everyone.
How Affiliate Links Work 101
Publishers can sign up to be an affiliate for all sorts of brands out there. Amazon is the big one, but you can also be an affiliate for Target, Bass Pro Shop, or one of the many hundreds of direct-to-consumer brands that exist like HelloFresh and the like. When a publisher signs up to be an affiliate for a company, they can start linking to different products or services that the company provides.
When you, the reader, click an affiliate link on a website (which usually just looks like a regular link to a product), a little piece of code called a cookie gets dropped into your browser. That cookie tags you as having come from the website that gave you the link. If you go on to buy that product within a certain timeframe, the website that referred you gets a small commission on the sale.
The price of the product doesn’t go up for you. The retailer just pays the publisher a percentage of the sale because the publisher sent the customer their way. It’s basically a form of advertising for the seller: pay-for-performance marketing. The retailer only pays out when somebody actually buys something.
The timeframe in which you have to buy the product for the publisher to get credit is called the “cookie window.” Different retailers have different cookie windows. Amazon’s is 24 hours, which is pretty dang short. Other retailers might have a 30-day window, or a two-week window, or a 7-day window. As we’ll see, the cookie window matters a lot.
The other thing that matters a lot is something called “last-click attribution.” If you click an affiliate link from one website, then click an affiliate link for that same brand on another website, and then make the purchase, the second website gets the commission. Last click wins. The first website gets nothing, even if its content is what convinced you to buy the thing in the first place.
That’s the basic mechanics. Now let me tell you our story.
