Welcome to part three of our alternative 2025 affiliate marketing trends.
Here we ask the Affiliate and Partner Marketing Association (APMA) members for their views on the channel in 2025.
Here’s part three of our alternative affiliate marketing trends. We hope you enjoy the answers as much as we did, and they spark some new ideas.
We ask James Maley (JM) from Tradedoubler, Marthe Berlin (MB) and Owen Hancock (OH) from Impact.com, Gaurav Arora (GA) from Skimlinks, Sophie Halley (SH) and Ben Smye (BS) from Atolls and Nader Ghanem (NG) from financeAds for their views.
What will affiliate marketing’s biggest headline in December 2025 be?
NG: The implications of AI in affiliate marketing, whether new tools to improve some technical aspects, or the way it will transform the scene especially on the publishers’ side of the business.
SH: Fair publisher payments alongside Awin’s announcement of the Conversion Protection initiative. i.e. we will see if other networks follow suit or if there will be a trend of brands migrating to SaaS networks to skip on override. I’m banking on the former!
BS: AI-driven offer personalisation helps increase conversion rates in the affiliate channel.
JM: Partner Marketing Poised for Record Investments Amid Growing Consumer Trust
Brands are increasingly directing record investments into partner marketing, spurred by above-average GMV growth rates. This trend is fuelled by consumers’ rising confidence in both classic affiliate models and newer channels like influencer marketing.
As the product and brand landscape continues to expand locally and globally, consumers are relying more heavily on publishers to navigate their choices. Authentic recommendations from influencers, combined with advancements in technology, are making partner marketing an increasingly effective channel for brands to connect with their target audiences and meet evolving consumer demands.
GA: Strong YoY growth despite the headwinds
OH: By late 2025, the big story will be how fully integrated partner ecosystems have outpaced traditional acquisition channels. Instead of siloed affiliate networks or standalone influencer deals, we’ll see a consolidated, data-rich environment where partners of every stripe—affiliates, influencers, customer referrers, and B2B allies—operate seamlessly under one global platform. The takeaway: holistic orchestration across regions and verticals, all optimised toward measurable, incremental growth.
What affiliate marketing trends or tech will change the way you do your job the most next year?
NG: AI will be more integrated in the day to day work, and reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks. AI will also allow us to react to changes more quickly.
SH: Boring answer but probably use of more AI tools in general.
BS: Echoing Sophie, I think it will be continued adoption of AI tools. I have lots of ideas for ways to use it in my role – beyond the obvious one of idea generation and content creation – and hope to explore some of those ideas in more detail next year. I think for us as a company, the same could be said, but I’d add that I can see it being used for more personalisation, perhaps even segmenting users more effectively and giving them bespoke deals. That’s partly also why I chose that headline for question one.
JM: AI is becoming deeply embedded in digital business strategies and will play a transformative role in Partner Marketing. In this performance-driven ecosystem, where Brands pay Publishers based on results, AI offers significant opportunities for efficiency and growth.
Publishers can leverage AI to precisely target high-converting users, enabling Brands to scale sales more effectively and efficiently. By optimizing campaigns in real-time, AI fundamentally changes how paid channel marketing operates—from deployment to targeting and content generation. Campaign managers will benefit from AI-driven insights to suggest new partnerships, tailor content delivery, and focus targeting with hyper-personalization.
AI also enhances return on ad spend (ROAS) by dynamically adjusting investments and refining campaign strategies in real-time. As AI continues to evolve, it will revolutionize the affiliate industry with scalable, hyper-optimized content creation, driving unparalleled consumer engagement and growth.
GA: AI – Not only will it improve efficiency; whether it’s AI meeting note-taking apps or being able to pull reports quickly, but also everyone in the industry will have to be educated on new AI trends to be able to adopt these within affiliate marketing
OH: Next year, expect advanced partner management solutions that unify discovery, contracting, attribution, and payment into a single, transparent workflow. Instead of wrangling disparate tools, you’ll refine your strategy with real-time insights, optimised commission models, and proactive compliance safeguards. The net effect? Less manual overhead and more time to develop nuanced growth strategies built on true performance data.
What’s a challenge in affiliate marketing no one’s talking about—but should be?
SH: I believe there’s still not enough attention on how some voucher sites use invalid content to gain traffic then track via subnetworks so they can operate under brands’ radar.
BS: I’m not too sure on this, as the things that come to mind are already being discussed. So, a bit of a cop out, but I think it’s the fact that, despite its size, affiliate is still seen by some people as a second-tier channel and we still haven’t managed to change this. Like I say, a bit of a cop out as it’s a topic we’ve talked about at APMA meetings this year and one that comes up pretty regularly in conversations I’ve had.
JM: AI presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, it risks fostering over-reliance, potentially stifling human creativity in campaigns and focusing solely on metrics like ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) at any cost. However, realistically spoken a balanced and symbiotic relationship can be developed with AI. By reflecting on and quickly learning from the generative AI missteps anticipated in 2025, its deployment and optimisation will enhance both creativity and performance.
GA: The consent issue and businesses (publishers) going bust; it’s not being talked about as much as it should be. Marry this with losses and redundancies off the back of Google’s spam policy updates earlier this year. This is very alarming.
OH: As brands scale across borders, the real sleeper issue is mastering local relevance at a global scale. We’re talking beyond language adaptations: marketers must align nuanced content strategies, product mixes, payouts, and compliance standards across diverse markets. Balancing brand consistency with hyper-local customisation—without losing operational efficiency—is the next big frontier.
MB: Publisher business models such as loyalty/cashback, content, etc. are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Most modern publishers now span several promotional methods and aren’t neatly classified into existing categories.
Insisting on trying to classify publishers into pre-existing business models poses a limitation to the channel as these categories continue to mean very little outside of channel lingo. We need to shift the conversation towards how publishers and partners can help brands to reach specific audiences rather than talking about what business model a publisher falls into.
Shifting our focus towards audience alignment and reaching new audiences will help the channel to overcome its prevalent perception outside of affiliates and partnerships as a last-click niche channel and will help partners to more meaningfully engage with stakeholders outside of the channel. This poses a challenge for networks and platforms who traditionally have focused on allocating partners to set categories, rather than building tools and technologies to classify publishers according to their audiences
In 10 words or fewer, predict the most surprising development in 2025?
NG: AI and Blockchain to follow
SH: More networks adopt fairer publisher payment initiatives like Awin’s CPI.
BS: Using blockchain technology for tracking starts to gain traction.
GA: Amazon affiliate programs mean more brands will invest bigger budgets.This should only grow the size of the pie – Amazon is testing their (seller) kickback attribution in US for now, but it’s likely to be expanded to other regions such as UK/EMEA.
JM: Brands will realise that tracking transparency is vital for partnerships.
OH: Holistic partner ecosystems outpace paid ads in fueling growth.
MB: I’ve got two: 1. Publishers use their collective voice to push for change, and 2. Huge growth opportunities with SMBs.
What’s your wildest prediction for affiliate marketing next year (go rogue!)?
NG: Content publishers might have to completely change their business model to survive with the development of AI.
SH: Nothing “wild!”, but I think we’ll see Chinese advertisers continuing to grow in dominance.
BS: Affiliate marketing takes off in the metaverse. I’d add that I don’t truly believe this will happen yet, but I wouldn’t rule it out; adoption of VR devices is quietly growing.
GA: See above!
JM: Quantum computing being used for affiliate marketing (v.rogue) but we have seen some incredible developments, most recently Google releasing their Quantum computing chip Google unveils ‘mind-boggling’ quantum computing chip – BBC News), so who knows…
We are more likely to see generative AI is deployed on increasing number of influencers from all sizes, generating adaptive dynamic content in real-time, on a performance basis. Whilst the majority of traffic and conversions are legitimate, it will also be misused, driving potential increase in farudulent and misleading traffic away from legitimate partners, presenting both a challenge and an opportunity.
OH: We’ll see brands, affiliates, and content creators co-developing products and campaigns as co-innovation partners. This isn’t just about distributing existing offers; it’s about generating entirely new product lines and marketing initiatives fueled by real-time partner insights. In other words, the lines between partner, publisher, and brand blur, forging a creative growth engine that drives performance beyond anything we’ve seen before.
MB: With the convergence of affiliate and influencer marketing, the channel will finally become mainstream marketing
Want more? Don’t forget to read part one of our affiliate marketing trends for 2025 and part two.
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