Deal types and terms
Affiliate marketing
In an affiliate deal a creator earns a percentage of the sales they generate, tracked through a unique discount code or link, rather than a fixed fee.
Also called commission deal, performance partnership.
Commission rates in consumer categories commonly sit between 5 and 20 percent. The appeal to a brand is that cost scales with revenue, so there is no downside if a post underperforms. The appeal to a creator is uncapped upside on a product their audience actually buys.
The tension is risk. Pure affiliate deals push all the risk onto the creator, and established creators usually decline them unless the conversion rate is already proven. A flat fee plus a smaller commission is the common compromise.
Related terms
- Performance-based pay
- Performance-based pay ties some or all of a creator's compensation to results such as sales, sign-ups, or clicks, rather than to publishing the content.
- ROAS
- ROAS is revenue divided by the spend that produced it, expressed as a multiple. A campaign that returned 30,000 in revenue on 10,000 of spend has a ROAS of 3.
- Conversion tracking
- Conversion tracking is how a brand ties a sale back to the creator who drove it, usually through a unique discount code, a tracked link, or a survey at checkout asking how the customer found the brand.
- Flat fee
- A flat fee is a fixed amount paid to a creator for agreed deliverables, regardless of how the content performs.
Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.