Advertisers expand affiliate efforts as creator marketing matures

The retailer is not alone. Affiliate marketing spend (including both traditional affiliate spending and creator affiliate spending) will increase 10.1% between 2025 and 2026 to $13.2 billion. Affiliate revenues for creators doubled between 2021 and 2024, rising from $570 million to $1.1 billion according to eMarketer.

Henry declined to share specific numbers but said that Walmart’s creator program currently includes “tens of thousands” of creators spanning the spectrum between mega-celebrities and micro-creators with a few thousand followers. 

“Our affiliate activity across how we work with content partners, influencer affiliate networks and Walmart Creator as our own platform has significantly grown,” she said. “Walmart Creator certainly is a big piece of that.”

‘A critical component of a modern marketing plan’

To recap, affiliate schemes work differently from a typical creator roster; rather than pay influencers for the content they create or based on the reach they can offer, brands compensate them based on sales commissions or another conversion indicator. The approach often appeals to retail brands with direct-to-consumer business models, or among marketers otherwise focusing on performance channels, noted Mae Karwowski, founder of WPP-owned creator agency Obviously. 

Denim brand American Eagle, for example, established its “Live Your Life” affiliate program in March; the program allows creators to build custom digital storefronts featuring handpicked American Eagle items, and receive a cut of each sale. 

This week, as the brand launches a major summer campaign led by a partnership with actor Sydney Sweeney, it’ll be deploying the affiliate scheme as part of a greater effort spanning CTV, paid social investments on Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, and creator activity. “This is the next frontier for a retailer,” CMO Craig Bommers told Digiday.

Big box retailer Best Buy launched a similar program in April. “Creators are a critical component of a modern marketing plan,” Jennie Weber, the brand’s chief marketing and design officer, told Digiday’s sister site Modern Retail. “We saw that the market was moving in this direction, where more and more consumers were actually leveraging social platforms for search.”

“Affiliate was very much seen as [just] a coupon code and a caption. Now it’s much more of a broader strategy to drive measurable outcomes, incentivize conversion and really extend the value of creator content,” said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of Captiv8.

Competition for creators

In other cases, brands are expanding affiliate schemes already in place – often by increasing the compensation on offer, in order to draw in greater numbers of participating influencers. In the run-up to the four-day Prime Day event, for example, Amazon’s retail business doubled the compensation it offers creators signed up to its affiliate program. Sales commissions on beauty and grooming products rose from 3% to 6%, according to Adweek, representing a significant increase in the platform’s influencer outlay.

Increasing the compensation on offer for creators represents the primary lever available to brands looking to scale up their affiliate creator operations. And competition between retail brands to recruit enough of the right kind of creator is stiff, noted Ryan Detert, CEO of Publicis Groupe creator agency Influential.

“The outlay of more dollars is to attract more scale,” said Detert. “You’re competing for the attention of consumers to buy your product, [and] the attention of affiliates to convince consumers to buy your products.”

Creators in the sweet spot of 50,000 to 100,000 followers aren’t found on trees, after all. Or as Joe Gagliese, co-CEO of Viral Nation put it: “Every beauty brand in North America has an ambassador and affiliate program. If you’re a mid size or small creator and you make your money from that, you need to choose one. You can’t do 85.”

They’re not just competing with other retailers, but with the broader creator economy. The sector’s maturity might be driving brands to look for more rigor from their creator activity, but it also means that influencers have a number of ways of making a living – not all of them linked to brand work. “They’ll become far less dependent on brands,” said Thomas Markland, CEO of creator agency HYDP.

Nevertheless, brands like Walmart still see affiliate creator schemes as one of the key solutions in their quest to scale up – and properly scrutinize – creator marketing. 

Affiliate programs, which result in easily measurable conversions in the forms of clicks and sales, allow marketers to more effectively gauge the impact of their influencer marketing spend compared to upper-funnel options such as non-affiliate branded content. 

“The reality for us is that creator marketing, and Walmart Creator in particular, wears multiple hats and plays multiple roles across that funnel, and across our objectives,” Henry said. “In some cases, it’s driving performance-oriented conversions, in that we are seeing very direct GMV [gross merchandise value] and sales come out of creators’ social posts that they’re then getting paid out of commission on.”

In an economy where marketers need to account as closely as they can for every dollar they can, that’s worth braving the competition for.