Key Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022: Insights on Top 25 Affiliate Networks

Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

We recently conducted an affiliate marketing survey that provided us with good insights about our audience and affiliate marketing in general.

According to the results, affiliate marketing is expected to thrive in 2022. Email marketing is alive and well and big investments are expected to pour into affiliate ad spend in 2022.

These results are based on responses from approximately 975 affiliate marketers of all levels. It is important to keep in mind this is a small sample. Many of the people who have taken this survey are either on our email list, they found the survey through watching youtube videos on both Powerhouse Affiliate and Day Job Hacks youtube channels, or they saw one of our banners that were live in the last two months.

A lot of our audience would be considered “new affiliates” or people who have been active for less than 2 years.

From the responses we also compiled a list of the top 25 affiliate networks mentioned for 2022.

Our affiliate marketing survey was conducted over the months of November and December 2021.

The purpose of the survey was to learn the current state of affiliate marketing from an affiliate’s perspective; the future of affiliate marketing; and what challenges affiliates expect to encounter as we move forward in today’s current environment.

Let’s be clear, I am not a scientist, but I compiled this blog post with my opinions on what the results may indicate. I think there is a lot to learn from these affiliate marketing statistics based on the amount of response received. So here are the results broken down.

Table of Contents

Question 1 – How Long Have You Been Doing Affiliate Marketing?

The affiliate survey was completed by a broad range of marketers from beginner to expert. Based on the results 28.8% would be considered “new affiliates” (less than 6 months), and nearly 20% of the affiliates have been in the game for more than 5 years. The amount of new affiliates entering the game is climbing every year based on our own sales of affiliate marketing training courses, so it is no surprise they are heavily weighed into these survey results.

Question 2 – Have you ever built a profitable online campaign/website?

affiliate survey 2022
Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

11% are currently in the “learning/explorative” phase of affiliate marketing while 89% have attempted to create a profitable campaign or profitable website.

More than half of the people who tried, have been succesful in creating a profitable campaign or website.

The moral of the story here seems to be – just take action and you stand a decent chance of making affiliate marketing work for yourself.

Question 3 – What Are the Top Affiliate Networks in 2022 That You Plan to Work With?

There were many responses and we decided to compile the top 25 affiliate networks in 2022 in no specific order below:

Maxbounty

Clickbank

CJ.com

PerformCb

Verve Direct

m4trix

Clickdealer

Marketcall

JVZoo

MarketHealth

Zeydoo

Shareasale

Adcombo

Crak Revenue

RingLab Media

Affiliati Network

Advidi Network

Maxweb

AdworkMedia

SellHealth

Amazon Associates

Wisdom

Impact

Madrivo

DMS (Formerly W4)

Question 4 – How Many Affiliate Websites Do You Own?

affiliate marketing statistics 2022
Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

The majority of affiliates surveyed own 1-3 websites. 11% own over 5 affiliate websites. 27.4% do not own a website or do not own what they would consider an “affiliate website”.

This could indicate they are using external services (clickfunnels, aweber etc) to manage their pages, lead generation and email marketing, they direct link, or they work directly with clients. This high number remains an unknown. The questions below may bring more clarity to what is happening here.

Question 5 What type of offers do you have the most success with?

Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

CPA lead generation takes the win on the types of offers affiliates are seeing the most success with.

Clickbank comes in at 28.4% then straight sale offers. There was a huge shift from trial offers to straight sale offers in the last 3 years.

Ecommerce offers come in at 16.4%.

Other responses (below 1% of responses) include Builderall, Clickfunnels affiliate program, Fiverr affiliate program, real estate offers, Advertising, “have not tried yet”, and “not applicable”.

Question 6 How much DAILY PROFIT do you earn from Affiliate Marketing? (on average for the last 30 days)

Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

43% of affiliates have not earned a profit. This is a bit surprising considering that our first question showed that we have 28.8% considered as new affiliates. (started within 6 months)

Nearly half of the respondents profit between $1-$500 daily.

8% of affiliates earn over $500 a day in profit.

This percentage of high income affiliates probably comes as no surprise to most people who have been in the industry for a while.

Many sources online suggest that CPA affiliate networks earn the majority of their revenue from a very small fraction of registered affiliates.

Could this be why many top CPA networks have closed their doors over the last few years? Is the affiliate network business model risky? (please share your comments below)

Question 7 How much on average do you spend on Paid Ads every month?

Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

Roughly 10% of those surveyed spend over $2000 a month in ad spend.

2.7% are spending between $10,000-$20,000 per month.

Only 1 Response was over $20,000 in ad spend which was a bit shocking and may indicate the survey sample size was not large enough.

Question 8 Do you currently do email list building in your affiliate marketing campaigns?

Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

Whoever said email marketing is dead? Email marketing has always been one of the most powerful online marketing tools available. Throughout email’s evolution, email marketers have found themselves reaping the benefits of email’s ability to track results in real time, its cost effectiveness, and its ability to outperform other forms of digital advertising.

32% of respondents use email marketing in their campaigns.

Question 9 If you answered Yes above, how much money on average do you earn from each email subscriber every month?

Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

Many articles online say you can expect “$1 per email subscriber per month” in revenue from your email list.

Clearly this number depends on multiple factors which could be why we have so many varying responses to this question.

And the survey says….

24% indicated a revenue of $1-$3 per subscriber per month. 48.6% say they earn less than 50 cents (but not zero).

Question 10 How much time per week do you spend on your affiliate marketing business?

Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

More than half of affiliates surveyed spend less than 10 hours a week on affiliate marketing.

Could this be the half who aren’t earning anything?

After spending over 2 decades in affiliate marketing my opinion is that if you want to make over $1000 a day in this business you need to work more than 10 hours a week.

People I know who make 4 figures a day are working all the time. Whether they are working on content, testing ads, setting up emails, managing outsourced staff, dealing with banned ad accounts, testing ads, or talking to people in the industry, they are working more than 10 hours a week.

Unless you are a lambo guru selling courses, 10 hours a week just isn’t going to cut it if you want to make a living as an affiliate marketer.

Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Question 11 What is the main type of traffic used for your affiliate website(s)?

affiliate stats 2022
Affiliate Marketing Statistics 2022

SEO, Content Marketing and Social Posting combined represent more than paid media buying with email list building coming in 3rd.

Many people probably combine all of these types of traffic for a well balanced flow of traffic.

Other responses included specific sources like Revcontent, Facebook, Google etc which were added to the “paid media buying” category.

Question 12 What are the biggest challenges you expect to face in 2022 as an affiliate?

Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

Respondents were allowed to select more than one answer. The top challenges expected this year are:

37% believe competition is getting better

34.2% believe ad account bans will be a problem

27.4% say Bot and fraud traffic.

Networks and advertisers not paying came in at 17.8%.

Other things that came up in the “other” category included procrastination, increased costs of services and software, supply chain issues, and tighter profit margins.

Question 13 What methods do you currently use to promote affiliate offers? Check All That Apply.

Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

Website SEO is the most common with paid search traffic coming in second. This is no surprise considering they both are considered search traffic.

So combined search traffic comes in at a whopping 75%.

Keep in mind respondents could select more than 1 option so they may combine other methods in their business.

Social influencer came in at 26%. (youtube, tik tok, IG etc)

This number could include people who have their own channels or they are the influencer.

What I thought was a shocker here is the low percentage who consider social media traffic as their “current method”.

Could this be a sign that Facebook account bans are crushing affiliates or does it mean our top tier affiliates are the only ones making social work?

Once we get into the weeds of this question there are some interesting responses such as: word of mouth, classifieds, banners, pop ads, safe list paid ads, udimi solo ads etc.

Question 14 Do you plan on or are you currently creating your own product?

Affiliate stats
Affiliate marketing statistics 2022

13.7% of affiliates also own their own product.

The rest of those who responded are either not interested in creating a product or they are in the process of exploring this as an option.

Question 15 What is the future of Affiliate Marketing? Is it dying? Will it Thrive? Why?

We had several responses and we left it open to allow people to type their responses. In order to save your brains from reading all of the responses we have compiled a decent summary.

Less than 2% of the respondents think affiliate marketing is dying. Here are some of the specific responses:

“Dying. Google is killing it”

“I think SEO for the smaller guy is dying and the small guys will need a big budget to stay in the game”

“It’s dying because teachers want more money than the students can afford”

“It’s dying because the payouts are not rising”

“It is going nowhere – it is getting way too saturated”

That means 98% of people who responded think it is thriving, or they expect it to grow over the coming years.

Here are some of their responses:

“I think it will thrive because companies will always need affiliates. If that means they have to pay more and pay faster than they will. Affiliate marketing has been around since the internet started. It is not going anywhere.”

“It will thrive as always I believe, but I am optimistic by nature. Even though competition in affiliate marketing is growing, people are online more and more these days and demand for products and services via online will only grow.”

“People will always want to purchase something from the internet/look up new things there. So as long as the internet exists, online stores exist and money exists, affiliate marketing exists.”

“Thrive. The traffic prices are getting higher and higher… Products owners will focuse more on building great offers.”

“It will never die, only evolve. Those who focus on value will be rewarded. Those who pop a shit ad for some clicks will fade away”

I think there will be both some risks due to more competition and regulation, but at the same time more and more people buy online and more companies use affiliate marketing. Overall I’m optimistic.”

“Affiliate marketing is no different than normal selling. it can’t die. what “billboard” makes the conversion, doesn’t change the fact that a sale is a problem solved. who told you the advice is irrelevant. affiliate marketing IS marketing.”

Question 16 What is the #1 piece of advice you would tell new people looking to start affiliate marketing?

Again we left this question open for people to say what they wanted so we have summarized what we felt are some of the top comments from the survey.

Keep in mind we had a bunch of comments like “just start and take action”, “don’t give up”, and “focus on one traffic source” but here are some more comments with specific actionable advice:

“You need money and time to understand how affiliate marketing works and the technical aspect behind everything, it’s like learning anything new, some people can pick it up fast and others take a while to understand, only way to find out is to start and see if it’s for you”

“Think value first, bring value to your visitor, money is just the consequence, result of the value you provide to others”

“Affiliate marketing is hard to start alone from scratch, in order to be successful you have to have a mentor. Someone with the industry experience who has tried and tested what does and doesn’t work. There are plenty of affiliate programs you can join out there but make sure that what you pay for it does not outweigh what they teach you. You can start by doing doing research on which programs have the best success

“PROMOTE PRODUCTS YOU ALREADY KNOW AND LOVE👇 This is the most common way to get started with affiliate offers.”

“You become an affiliate for something that you’ve used yourself, had a good experience with, thoroughly tested and feel good recommending. You should be fairly confident that others will get the same results you did (or better), as long as they do the work.”

“Don’t be afraid to spend $ to find your winning offers. Get your skin into the game. Don’t sit on the fence. Only then you will learn at an accelerated rate.”

“From experience… its no tactics, tricks, tips, or techniques. Its self development. Most people fail because of themselves. Work on yourself first, this is a real business.”

Focus on one niche that you are interested in and then just start. Don’t worry about failure, focus on gathering experience.”

“My concise advice would be to keep yourself updated with latest happening in affiliate marketing circle, absorb right knowledge under the able guidance of someone who themselves are a true marketer. If possible go and enroll for a mentor ship program of genuine marketer.”

Start list building as soon as you can. Learn all you can about the different traffic sources.”

“Just do sh*t. Don’t expect help, it’ll come when you truly need it. don’t get sucked into product creation and social media organic traffic mirage too long. the money is the conversion, only there. do lead gen instead. focus on that.”

“Focus on data, make sure you test everything, if you don’t have data ask your affiliate managers for data. Don’t just accept street payouts always negotiate for more, don’t just buy ads because you can – do your research first with an ad account manager or by doing some spying. Don’t rip and run but find out what is working and try and make it better.”

SUMMARY

While our Affiliate marketing statistics 2022 are based on a small sample, affiliates generally feel it is thriving and affiliates are confident in their future!

If you are looking to make money through affiliate marketing, you should be aware that the online world is changing at a rapid rate.

To succeed in the world of affiliate marketing, you need to stay on top of these changes and adapt quickly.

Content marketing is the future of affiliate marketing.

The days of sending out spammy links are long gone, and in the near future it will be much more beneficial to focus on providing high quality content that your readers find useful.

That concludes our affiliate marketing statistics for 2022 hopefully you have gathered some useful information. Please feel free to share this on your website or give us a link back!

What are your thoughts on our Affiliate marketing statistics 2022?

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