Affiliate Survives as a Specialty, Not an Afterthought

Business Insider, Forbes, CNN, Time, Mail Online… What do all of these brands have in common? They have all reported that their affiliate revenue is down. And all brands that, for better or worse, had no business operating affiliate businesses to begin with.

As with all business models on the internet, when one publisher sees success with a strategy, everyone flocks to that. It has happened with every model: programmatic ads, video, podcasts, subscriptions, affiliate, events… you name it. Major publishers will flock to trending strategies, whether they should or not.

Bron has a great story this week that’s worth reading because it digs into much of what’s been going on from a Google Search perspective vis-à-vis affiliate revenue. Some publishers still see an affiliate model that is working, in part because Google sees them as authorities or because they’re good at squeezing the lemon tighter.

For publishers that are trying to figure out how to make this model continue working, it’s important to ask: why?

I’ve long believed that the product dictates the business model. In other words, the type of publication you are running should dictate how you monetize. In 2020, when everyone was talking about subscriptions, I wrote a piece about this and said:

The tunnel vision right now has to do with subscriptions. They’re all the rage. I get it. They should be all the rage right now because they’re working. These past few months have been very friendly to those publishers that have a subscription product, so naturally, everyone else is thinking about getting into the business.

The problem is that publishers are coming at this from the wrong perspective. They’re looking at other companies launching subscriptions and saying, “I need to do that too.” They are letting the business model dictate what they want to do next.

They are deciding that a subscription is what they want to offer their audience and then working backwards, trying to define what product might make the most sense to fit within that model. By this very nature, they have entered the product development arena with a limited scope. They have effectively said that they only want to deliver a product to their audience that works with a monthly/yearly renewal.

This is a problem because they forget about the core constituency that is actually going to be forking over money: the user.

What have you built for the audience and why are they coming? The answer to that question dictates the business model that you should be deploying. Are you a high-volume, low originality news company? You’re probably not going to get away with a subscription business. On the other hand, are you a low-volume, super niche, highly original news company? Subs might work.

Well, it’s the same thing for affiliate marketing. What do Business Insider, Forbes, CNN, Time, Mail Online all have in common? They’re high-volume, relatively low originality news companies. News. Not reviews. Their theoretical audience trust is tied to their ability to report the news, not to tell you which VPN makes sense. But because of an SEO fluke—domain authority—that Google allowed to persist for years, these news businesses moved into new niches using their reputation and raked in cash.

Compare that to Apartment Therapy. It restructured its commerce team earlier this year to focus on providing more value to its audience. In a story that Christiana did:

The commerce team is now known as the shopping team and has been shifted to work under the editorial division with a mission to not chase affiliate dollars but to serve readers in helping them find what they need, Apartment Therapy Media President Riva Syrop told AMO. That was done after traffic began to dip as Google updated its algorithm to prioritize content that demonstrates expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness—a move that tanked traffic at websites of all kinds.

The business model follows the product. Apartment Therapy realized it needed to serve its audience with great information, and the monetization would follow. Its audience knows what to expect and has learned to trust the brand.

And the business—both affiliate and broader—is working. In March, we reported ~13% of its revenue came from commerce-related activities. Adweek reported in 2024 that Apartment Therapy was targeting $40 million in 2024 revenue and in 2025, it’s projecting a 26% revenue bump. That would have it just over $50 million in revenue. If its EBIT margins stayed constant—we reported 10% earlier this year—that means the business is generating ~$5 million.

It has found a way to monetize its audience using its specialty rather than chasing models that do not make sense. It has launched new products that feed on that specialty—a floor planner, a mood board, etc.—that its audience can trust. Then it monetizes accordingly.

And commerce is not an afterthought to Apartment Therapy. They invest in it. The business model followed the product. Its strategy lent itself to a certain content type which lent itself to a certain monetization type.

Much of the rewiring of the internet—something I’ll return to in a future column—and the reactions by our industry are correcting bad decisions. Our industry is notorious for jumping from idea to idea in an uncommitted way. “I know, we’ll do reviews,” says one executive and then hires freelancers at a low rate to create as much content as possible despite no subject matter expertise. “I know, let’s become a subscription business,” says another, and they just throw a paywall up in front of their content without any thought about how to market.

To truly execute on a business model, you need to understand why it should exist. It’s why the most successful media companies keep their heads down and execute the same play year after year. They set out with a clear strategy, build a good product, the audience resonates and then they monetize accordingly. The alternative leads to news companies thinking they have the authority to do reviews. Spoiler alert: They don’t.