Affiliate marketing spent this summer in the papers.
In July, Bloomberg reported that Phia, the shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates, had been claiming commission on sales it did not drive. The company called it a bug. The following month, the same publication reported that internal messages suggested its founders had known since December. Phia has denied parts of the account and says it is reversing affected transactions. It was suspended by the network Impact.com and, it later emerged, the FTC had been receiving consumer complaints about it since January.
Then the researcher Ben Edelman turned to ShopMy, publishing archived guidance in which the platform advised brands to resolve duplicate orders by “canceling duplicates within the affiliate network, not ShopMy”. Edelman identified 527 ShopMy brand partners also running programmes elsewhere. ShopMy declined to comment to The Business of Fashion.
No charges have been brought against anybody.
It would be easy to file all this as a niche row about tracking cookies. It is not. It is a fight over who gets paid when you buy a jumper, and that fight has become one of the quietest, strongest forces deciding what fashion media recommends in the first place.
What is an affiliate link?
An affiliate link is a normal link with a tag on the end. With a click, a cookie lands in your browser, you buy, and the publisher takes a percentage of the sale. The convention is last click: whoever supplied the final click before checkout takes the lot.
That convention is the whole problem.
Fast fashion is now cheap and accessible enough that plenty of items can be bought on a single click, with no research required to justify the spend, because the price clears almost any budget. Shopping should be the opposite of that. It should involve research, thought and some honest assessment of whether the thing will be valued, appreciated and actually worn.
None of which the current model rewards. Only the final party is paid. The journey that led there counts for nothing, so platforms spend enormous energy arranging to be last in the queue. Cookie stuffing, the practice Phia was accused of, is simply dropping your tag into somebody else’s journey and claiming it as your own.
These links carry more economic weight than most people assume. eMarketer put US retail sales driven by affiliates at $210bn last year.
Why publishers cannot walk away
With the continuing demise of print and of publishing houses as we knew them, affiliates stopped being a nice extra revenue stream and became a load-bearing lifeboat.
Future, one of the UK’s largest magazine publishers, saw affiliate revenue reach £79m as far back as its 2020 financial year, roughly 23 per cent of group turnover, on 13.6 million transactions. By 2023, Vogue had seven full-time commerce staffers, more than its features team. Commerce brands were then spun up as businesses in their own right: CNN Underscored, Forbes Vetted, The Guardian’s The Filter and Indy Best.
We are now seeing what the end state looks like. In April, Condé Nast cut most of Glamour’s remaining US editorial team and parted ways with its editor in chief. The New York Times found the homepage listing one remaining editor and four commerce editors and writers. Eighty-seven years of journalism, restructured into sandal round-ups and paid-for expert advice pointing readers to a checkout.
Why do fashion round-ups recommend the same brands?
This is a problem for emerging brands, for sustainable brands, for brands outside the fashion capitals, and for the PR and communications teams attached to them.
Joining an affiliate programme takes technical know-how, expertise and then a sizeable chunk of every sale. As publications lean further into affiliate revenue, offering that kickback is becoming a prerequisite for being mentioned, recommended or reviewed at all.
In BoF’s 2023 report on affiliate marketing, Diana Pearl documented a small jewellery brand that spent more than a year failing to land editorial. It joined an affiliate network. Placement followed within weeks. Networks told BoF publishers can expect as much as 20 per cent, higher than a typical influencer rate, and that where several brands compete for one slot in a round-up, the commission rate is often the tie-breaker.
For emerging, small-scale and genuinely non-commercial brands, that is a substantial barrier to entry. A brand using certified fibres, short runs and honest margins is being asked to hand over a fifth of the sale price for the privilege of being considered. Shein and Amazon find that arithmetic easier. Zara does not participate at all, because it does not have to.
What emerges looks like judgement and behaves like inventory. The same dozen names in different orders, under different bylines, in a format built for readers who have already decided to buy and are looking for permission.
Last year, the fashion journalist Sophie Benson traced the sharper version of this for 1 Granary. Her example: the writer Alden Wicker had contributed her expertise to a critical feature about the duplicates brand Quince, raising concerns about its transparency and its sustainability claims. When she went looking for the finished piece, she found it surrounded by other articles recommending the same brand’s products, affiliate links attached. The reporting was not enough to stop the wider publication selling the thing it had just interrogated.
In defence of the link
Affiliate money is not the villain. It funds reporting that display advertising no longer pays for, and it is measurable, which the old arrangement of quietly featuring the advertiser never was.
Done properly it also rewards rigour rather than volume. Wirecutter converts at roughly 40 per cent against an industry average nearer 4 per cent, on articles averaging 4,500 words. Trust converts. That is good news, and it is an argument for the model rather than against it.
No clicks, no commission
Just as affiliate links were becoming structural across fashion, beauty, tech and consumer lifestyle, Google’s AI Overviews started eating the search traffic that fed it. Publishers have reported review and buyers’ guide traffic down by up to half, and affiliate revenue down 20 to 40 per cent in some cases, as reported by Press Gazette.
In late stage capitalism, a threatened commercial model does not become more principled. It becomes leaner. Fewer clicks and a shrinking revenue stream mean coverage is prioritised around the brands and marketplaces that convert and pay best.
The emerging brand with no programme does not simply struggle to make the lists, the reviews and the features. It is now reliant on the goodwill of individual journalists, whose capacity shrinks as quantity displaces quality, unless it can promise the clicks and the traffic a publication needs. A double-edged sword, and another barrier for challenger brands already facing fast fashion, luxury and high street incumbents.
A wolf in journalism’s (recommended) clothing
The UK does regulate this, up to a point. The ASA requires affiliate content to be obviously identifiable, and its guidance states that a generic disclaimer saying the author “may” receive a commission is “unlikely to be acceptable”. MailOnline articles have been judged advertising in their entirety.
That said, labelling only answers the most superficial question. It tells you money may change hands. It does not tell you whether the brand paid to be included, what rate it agreed, or which brands were left out for having no programme at all. Articles framed as expert advice, opinion or recommendation should earn trust, not quietly file genuine enthusiasm alongside paid-for insertions while the space for unpaid recommendation shrinks.
The pattern is familiar. It belongs to the same conversation as the death of personality and taste, the omnipresence of AI-generated content and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it churn of microtrends. The spread of affiliate links across national, regional and consumer titles has consequences for personal style, for taste and for trust, on both sides of the page. It is a race to the bottom, and the result is a steady stream of the same established brands across every marketing channel at once.
The uncomfortable part is that change is unlikely to come from journalists inside these publications, because this is the revenue stream keeping the lights on. There is hope elsewhere. Plenty of writers and readers have already decamped to newsletters, Substack and TikTok, where the person doing the recommending is the entire point.
As the line between editorial and advertorial keeps blurring, readers, shoppers and the easily influenced, of whom I am one, should be asking for something fairly modest. If a shopping edit is a marketplace, label it as one. Publish commission bands. Flag the pieces in which every brand featured pays. Reserve a share of coverage for brands with no programme, and say so out loud.
The playing field needs levelling, whatever happens with the fraud, the cookie stuffing and the scrap over the last click. Readers should be recommended brands because they mean something to a journalist, not because they pay. Credibility is what gives a reader a real choice, and without it the newer, harder, better ways of making clothes never get a hearing at all.
