The Affiliate Hypothesis, Available for Pre-Order

Written by Brook Schaaf

For my entire career in affiliate marketing, now over twenty-five years, I’ve wondered why the channel hasn’t made more headway. Sure, it’s finally, mostly on the map, but why isn’t it bigger? The model is inherently elegant: a flexible, low-opportunity-cost engagement with unlimited upside for value creators. Indeed, the proposition is so strong that it could be the basis for a restructuring of the commercial web, in turn supporting the non-commercial web. 

Thus, it is with great pleasure that I announce The Affiliate Hypothesis: Universal Link Monetization to Save the Open Web is available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Simon & Schuster. This book explores why affiliate marketing has underperformed relative to its natural potential and provides a roadmap for future growth. It has been a great passion project, and I’m thrilled to see it come to fruition—a huge thank you to everyone who contributed, especially the teams at FMTC and at Advantage Books.

The Affiliate Hypothesis is straightforward: commercially relevant links and content should be monetized whenever possible, and affiliate marketing is often the best, possibly the only, way of doing so. This is not how the web has been structured to date, though it could be in the future, which would greatly benefit publishers, advertisers, and the entire web ecosystem. 

The book, suitable for both new and experienced affiliate marketers, provides a coherent explanation of affiliate marketing within the larger advertising ecosystem. This includes a contrast with its largest competing channels: walled gardens and open web programmatic advertising, a contest for dollars that most of us probably aren’t even properly aware of. 

And, yes, the book does contemplate clickless tracking. While this will take years to play out, I have, as best I’ve been able to determine, anticipated the direction things are going. Whatever standards come to be accepted, they will essentially roll into the overall thesis: the commercial value of the web is not properly distributed, and affiliate marketing is the best way to correct this. 

I hope you will consider purchasing it for yourself and each and every affiliate marketing aficionado you know and love.