Know what 501 affiliate
programs actually pay

How this directory is built

Affiliate terms are scattered across vendor pages, disclosed inconsistently, and changed without notice. A rate with no date and no link cannot be checked by the person reading it. This one is built so that every number can be traced back to the page it came from.

Every figure is read off the vendor's own page

Not a roundup, not a blog post, not another directory. The source URL on every record is the page the figure was printed on, and checkedOn is the date it was read. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the field says not stated — which is itself worth knowing before you build content around a program.

Pages are found by sweeping, not guessing

A program page can sit at /affiliates, /affiliate-program, /partners or a dozen other paths. Each candidate domain is swept across all of them and the results scored, because guessing one URL and believing the 404 is how a directory ends up with gaps it cannot see.

A page that scores well is still read by a person

Scoring finds candidate pages; it does not read them. A vendor's own blog post explaining what affiliate marketing is scores higher than most real terms pages and contains none — /affiliate-marketing was swept 1192 times and yielded 13 usable pages. So does a reseller hub, and a vendor's own affiliate-campaign product. Every record here was written by reading the page rather than pattern-matching it, and roughly one candidate domain in four ends up with a publishable record.

Submissions are checked against the page, not taken on trust

Anyone can submit a program, free. What they send is a URL — not figures. Any figure a submitter volunteers is checked against the vendor's page and discarded; what gets published is what the page says. A claim that is not on the page is rejected outright, which is what stops a free form being used to plant a number.

The build refuses to publish an unsourced fact

A validator runs before every build and aborts it on a missing source, a missing date, a date in the future, a category outside the list, or a record that contradicts itself. No figure reaches this page by being typed in.

The data is re-read, and drift is reported rather than patched

Terms change. A re-check tool re-reads every source page and reports which published figures are no longer on it — it never changes a figure, because a tool that repairs itself produces wrong numbers instead of no numbers. A record's date moves forward only when its page was read, every figure on the record is still on it, and a second reader — a language model asked a yes-or-no question about each figure — agrees; anything else waits for a person. The last full pass, on 27 Oct 2026, re-read 480 source pages (13 more would not load); 452 still carried their published figures. 7 records have been added since, each read once, on the date it carries.

What the data says about the vendors

Five terms decide what an affiliate actually earns: commission rate, recurring or one-time, cookie window, minimum payout and payout method. A vendor either states each one on its own program page or it doesn't.

Across the 501 programs here, 39% of those are not published at all, and 38 state no commission rate anywhere. That share has held roughly steady as the directory grew — 41% at 38 records, then 37% at 124 records, then 37% at 219 records, then 41% at 351 records, now 39% at 501 — so it is a property of how vendors publish, not an artefact of which ones got collected first. The guide breaks all of it down.