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Are affiliate content sites dead?
Canary in the coal mine as Authority Hacker shuts down affiliate courses
John Wright
December 19, 2024
As of 2 days ago, co-founder of Authority Hacker, Gael Breton, made a post that started off with this sentence:
After 10 years of teaching SEO, we're closing our flagship courses.
For those that don’t know, Authority Hacker has had a solid reputation for teaching people how to build affiliate content sites.
That is teaching people the fundamentals of SEO (search engine optimization), picking a niche, ranking a site and making money from it with affiliate marketing.
Shoutout to newsletter sponsors statsdrone.com and ftdx.io
Shocking post by Gael Breton, co-founder of Authority Hacker
Here is my tl;dr summary of where I think affiliate marketing is going. FYI some people think we have been here for years.
Affiliates need to productize their brand
Revenue diversification beyond affiliate commissions
Authority sites requires more quality
Demand gen is replacing demand capture
Media is the new content
More community driven
People as brands
As a former affiliate manager over 15 years ago, I watched first hand affiliates setting up iGaming affiliate sites with basically no investment and making good money.
The recipe was super easy:
Buy a domain
Setup WordPress
Write blogs and reviews
Add tracking links
Brag to others how amazing you are
I don’t think those days are completely over but close to it and it is why my advice to future affiliates is to pivot. That is do anything but build another affiliate website.
A year ago, people were raving about AI content and today, it just seems like affiliate sites are struggling unless you’re Gentoo buying assets like AskGamblers and CasinoMeister. Or Gambling.com acquiring sites like OddsJam for a cool $160 million USD.
OddsJam, a solid product, I mean affiliate
If you take a note of AskGamblers, CasinoMeister and OddsJam, they are more than your typical affiliate sites, they are products.
That is why I’ve said in previous affiliate coaching articles (see here and here) to pivot by creating a podcast so you can be number 1 in another channel. I also said to diversify revenue so it wasn’t solely affiliate marketing as the only revenue source.
I replied to Gael Breton’s post and got this reply as a comment:
By definition if you have your own product you’re not an affiliate. You’re a product owner. Yes, there is still room for product driven companies but even they will struggle to earn traffic from info content down the line I think. Google wants to link to the products directly or to UGC at this point. Basically affiliates need to stop thinking as affiliates and build full fledged businesses. This then opens new traffic sources and monetization methods, and yes, online entrepreneurship is still fully doable. It’s just that our courses were geared towards the pure affiliate model, and this model is now outdated.
Quoting Travis Jamison whom runs Smash Digital and numerous other ventures, he had this to say about the article:
I 110% agree with them. SEO is almost BETTER THAN EVER for many niches and models, but the affiliate model is dead (been saying it for ages). No barrier to entry combined with Google hating those sites. It's time to move on.
Richard Patey who runs the Digital Asset Investor newsletter just weighed in that he’s been saying this for over a year. That is, affiliate sites are dead.
Social proof by Richard Patey
He wrote on his recent newsletter post here
Building real brands that sell their own products or services. Whether that’s an ecommerce business, a software business or an agency or local business. Anything where the NAP is actually real. And then using newsletters on beehiiv as a top of funnel.
Daniel Stanica from monetize.info wrote on Facebook:
💼 I still see the potential of content websites as long as they evolve into real authoritative brands in their niche. This would mean offering more than written content—tools and products, having diversified traffic sources, and having a community around them. 📈 So, the entry point bar was raised once again. However, with fewer competitors, the ones that make it have the potential to become really big.
I’m giving a sneak peak at an interview I recorded with Noelle Spagna who’s an affiliate program manager at The Motley Fool.
Noelle Spagna, affiliate manager from The Motley Fool
Noelle had this to say on what channels she was seeing a greater impact with.
I'm definitely seeing a lot more video and yeah, and we've actually had partners starting to use AI to create the videos and which makes it a lot easier for them because the production costs are smaller. And again, like I said, we are building out this YouTube program with creators, so it's definitely been a bigger channel.
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