The Affiliate and Partner Marketing Association launched its first AI and LLM publisher survey this year specifically because nobody has clean data on what is happening in the publisher space right now.
They are asking because the signals are hard to ignore.
Publishers are being squeezed from two directions at once.
At the top of the funnel: Google's AI Overviews have contributed to a 25% drop in referral traffic for publishers. Users are getting answers from AI without clicking through to content sites. Traffic that used to flow through publishers to brands is increasingly intercepted before it arrives.
At the bottom of the funnel: Amazon just cut affiliate commissions by up to 50% for many publishers quietly, with no public announcement. Publishers who built content operations around 8 to 10% commission rates are now looking at 4 to 5%.
Put those two things together and a content publisher who built their business on Google traffic and Amazon monetization is facing a fundamentally different economic reality than they were 18 months ago.
Here is what this means for brands.
Publishers are actively looking for alternatives. They need new monetization models, new brand partners, new commission structures that replace what they are losing. The publishers you could not get a response from a year ago are more receptive today.
But most affiliate programs are not set up to capture that moment. Reporting is not clean enough. Commission structures are not compelling. Onboarding takes too long.
The brands that simplify the path for publishers to work with them directly clean tracking, competitive commissions, fast payments, real data are going to pick up high-quality partners that would have been unavailable 12 months ago.
The squeeze on publishers is real. For ready brands, it is also an opening.
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Talk soon,
Fred