It’s the Death of Easy Affiliate Marketing Dollars
By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly
Update: Google said in a blog post today that it has clarified its site reputation abuse policy language to “further target this type of spammy behavior. We’re making it clear that using third-party content on a site in an attempt to exploit the site’s ranking signals is a violation of this policy — regardless of whether there is first-party involvement or oversight of the content.”
Blind affiliate marketing built on the backs of publishers’ strong domain authority is showing its cracks. The consequences are already proving devastating for those dependent on this revenue stream.
Last week, Adweek reported:
The search visibility of the Forbes, Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fortune, and Time affiliate businesses has fallen dramatically in recent months, according to data from the search visibility firm Sistrix and multiple search consultants.
That lost traffic is cumulatively worth at least $7.5 million, according to Sistrix.
These publishers had been generating passive revenue by working with third-party vendors, including Forbes Marketplace (a separate company from Forbes), Credible, and Three Ships, which operate affiliate businesses for these publishers on their domains using their branding.
The drops in visibility are incredibly deep. According to the Sistrix data, Forbes Advisor is down nearly 43%—and that’s the smallest drop. Time Stamped is down 97.5%. WSJ’s Buy Side is down 77.3%.
Sistrix suggests $7.5 million in lost traffic. Given how crucial these revenue streams have become and the brief timeframe measured, losses could cost tens of millions of dollars over the coming months and going into 2025.
These publishers were essentially “licensing” the very strong domain names they’ve built to 3rd-parties to monetize search traffic. According to Moz, Forbes and WSJ both have domain authorities of 94, which is nearly as high as possible with this metric.
Once these third parties got their hands on the domain names, they created content for as many different keywords as possible. In many respects, it was hands-off. In the case of Forbes, it partnered with Forbes Marketplace Holdings, a third-party company, to take care of that part of the business.
And other publishers took advantage of this as well. According to Lars Lofgren, CNN and USA Today both use Marketplace to power their respective businesses. Time partnered with Taboola to power its Time Stamped business. And I suspect there are many other publishers out there that were doing this.
These affiliate operations were carefully structured to maximize SEO benefits, using subdirectories (domain.com/subdirectory) rather than subdomains (subdomain.domain.com) to inherit the parent site’s domain authority. As Lofgren noted:
for Underscored Money, a bunch of the WordPress files are in /cnn-underscored/money/wp-content/ which means there’s a separate and unique version of WordPress installed in /cnn-underscored/money/. I believe the main Underscored site is using cms.cnn.com for all its stuff.
This separate WordPress installation suggests someone deliberately structured these operations as independent entities while leveraging the main domain’s authority.
But now the question is whether they will continue to do this with Google penalizing them. They need to think very hard about that. As Adweek’s Mark Stenberg wrote, “This shift could mark an end to the era of publishers outsourcing their affiliate efforts, according to Ray.”
That’s likely an understatement. But no one should be surprised that this happened to begin with. If I had to guess, this is what occurred. Some publishers started to realize that the affiliate market universe wasn’t as black hat as they originally thought. USA Today had acquired the Reviewed portfolio back in 2011 and The New York Times bought Wirecutter in 2016.
The potential revenue was significant. As with any successful media business model, others quickly followed suit. The pivot to commerce ramped up during the pandemic, when people were buying everything imaginable and publishers wanted their cut. They had all the traffic and the immense domain authority.
The problem is, they were all writing nearly identical content. Visit any of the top publishers and they have headlines that say something like “the 10 best CD rates for November 2024.” It checks all the SEO boxes: the right keyword “CD rates” and a timeframe “November 2024.” Fortune Recommends has resorted to publishing an article every day with the headline “Current price of gold as of [date].” Why?
So, here’s how we got here. What comes next?
Reviewed is already shutting down. In a leaked memo, management talked about how the drop in search traffic was a big contributor to this. Years ago, NYT made the decision to pivot Wirecutter from free to paid—perhaps in anticipation of search cutting off traffic. The other publishers that Adweek analyzed are going to experience a similar situation. With such dramatic drops in search visibility, survival becomes questionable.
However, affiliate marketing isn’t dead—it just needs to evolve. Staffing a massive team of people to write very thin product reviews—or long, pointless articles—is not going to work. As the Adweek article suggests, “It is rare to see such a small number of sites be affected by an SEO update, and it is rarer still to see site directories, rather than the domains themselves, experiencing isolated drop-offs.” Google is clearly taking a very surgical approach to this.
Therefore, affiliate marketing needs to become a tactic that is incorporated into publishers’ everyday editorial process. If a pub is naturally writing an article about what a celebrity wore, for example, then they can include links to where to buy that stuff. Or, if a site is about a certain category of product, it makes sense to include links. But these large-scale, general interest affiliate sites are unlikely to work.
The key reason is expertise. The Wall Street Journal has little credibility reviewing office chairs, but I would trust WSJ to tell me which brokers make the most sense to work with. Similarly, I would trust a healthcare site on exercise equipment far more than a general “reviews” website.
Adding to these challenges is the recently announced shopping experience from Perplexity. According to Mashable:
Today, the AI-driven search engine unveiled “Buy with Pro,” a shopping assistant within Perplexity searches that gives you a one-click shopping experience. If you’re researching products, or some kind of shopping-related query, Perplexity includes products in its responses that can be bought on the page — as long as your payment info is saved in the app.
If this works, it’s going to cut into publishers’ affiliate businesses even more because people will go to a single destination to do their research. While affiliate marketing will persist, it’s going to be harder to make it work.
