The Convergence of Influencer and Affiliate Marketing is a Win-Win for Brands and Creators

When William J. Tobin created the first-ever affiliate marketing program in 1989, for his company PC Flowers & Gifts, “influencer” was several decades away from being a job title. Even when Amazon created what would become the model for affiliate marketing with its Associates Program in 1996, “influencer marketing” wasn’t a commonly used phrase, let alone a way one could earn a living.

In the past decade, however, influencer marketing has become a major industry, pegged to grow to $24 billion worldwide by the end of 2024. In comparison, affiliate marketing is expected to be a $15.7 billion industry by the end of the year.

And now affiliate marketing and influencer marketing are converging. The result is influencer affiliate marketing and benefits abound for retailers, brands, and content creators alike. Here’s how to make sure you benefit.

What is Influencer Affiliate Marketing?

WithThe Convergence of Influencer and Affiliate Marketing traditional affiliate marketing, the primary goal is to sell product, and the method is low-risk for both the brand or retailer and the affiliate. A publisher or blogger is the typical affiliate, who agrees to place on their website a text link or ad unit with a link back to the retailer’s site; in exchange, the affiliate receives a commission on any sales (or sometimes, other actions) the link generates. If the link doesn’t generate much in sales, no harm done: It’s not as if the retailer had paid the affiliate up front, nor had the affiliate spent resources creating special content.

Influencer marketing raised the stakes for all parties. Influencers are often relied on for top-of-funnel brand awareness as well as sales. In exchange for creating content touting a brand or product and promoting it to their hard-won followers on social media, influencers often want to be paid an up-front 'fee-per-post'. Retailers on the other hand like to pay on a performance basis and the affiliate marketing platforms are a great way to measure influencer results. Without affiliate marketing, measuring the effectiveness of influencer campaigns can be trickier and can be more qualitative than quantitative so therein lies trend twards convergence.

Our research survey of creators and brands with affiliate marketing leader Impact showed 47% of brands prefer flat-fee with performance bonuses. Pay-per-post plus commission is emerging as the top compensation model across all follower counts, offering a win-win by sharing both risk and reward.

Influencer affiliate marketing offers the best of both worlds: Retailers and brands gain access to the influencer’s audience on social media but pay the influencer via commission, or via commission plus a small flat fee. Influencers can earn a steady income even when they don’t have a brand sponsorship deal. And when influencers use a platform-agnostic deep-linking tool (such as URLgenius), they can link ''app-to-app' directly to the retailer’s category or product pages so that they receive the credit—and the commission—for each sale, as well as metrics they can then show to potential brand sponsors to prove the value of a partnership.

What's the Catch?

ThereThe Convergence of Influencer and Affiliate Marketing in 2025 really isn’t one. However, persuading some influencers to be paid on a commission basis rather than a flat fee can be difficult. Some influencers may not even be familiar with affiliate marketing and may not even have a website. A survey of 200 influencers by affiliate marketing agency The Motherhood found that 94% preferred receiving a flat fee as payment. What’s more, one-third wouldn’t even consider working on an affiliate basis.

Of course, that means two-thirds of influencers would—and many, many do. Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 benchmark survey found that nearly 50% of brands and retailers now pay influencers a percentage of sales, up from 21% in 2023, making it the most popular payment method for the first time. In contrast, only 24% pay a flat rate.

Macro and mega influencers—those with at least 500,000 followers—are most likely to demand an up-front sponsorship fee. But followers shouldn’t be your only, or even most important, criterion when choosing influencers to partner with. Engagement levels are at least as critical, and smaller influencers typically have significantly higher engagement rates. Can the influencer move product? One study found that micro influencers (those with fewer than 15,000 followers) had an average TikTok engagement rate just shy of 18%, while those with more than 1 million followers had an average engagement rate of less than 5%. The same pattern held on Instagram and YouTube as well. Other studies come to a similar conclusion: Influencers with smaller, more-niche audiences not only engage more with their followers, and vice versa, but they also have more credibility. And that’s on top of their being much more affordable!

How to Attract and Keep Influencers

Let’s say you’ve compiled a list of influencers you’d like to sign on as affiliates. You’re confident they fit your brand—perhaps they’ve already featured your product in their content or mentioned you in hashtags—and you like their content. They are active on platforms that appeal to your target audience, and you’re impressed with their engagement levels as well as their number of followers. Below are a few tactics to woo, win, and retain influencer affiliates:

Platforms like URLgenius solve for that web login friction between apps (not website required in between). As a cloud-based, platform-agnostic app-to-app linking solution, URLgenius enables influencers to link directly from social media apps to ecommerce apps like Amazon and Walmart, bypassing web login pages. This has been proven to boost conversion rates for influencers dramatically, which of course benefits, influencers (affiliates), retailers and brands. What’s more, it accurately attributes those sales to the influencers, enabling them to double, triple, or even quadruple their commissions, motivating them to continuing promoting the products. Another benefit is that URLgenius measures non-personally identifiable information (PII) including clicks, app opens, device, and platform. Beyond being able to track performance, influencers can use the information to even see approximately where their followers are located and the most popular links so that they can continue to optimize their content.

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