I saw a post recently, implying that maybe advertisers are to blame for affiliate fraud, as they approve affiliates. It stuck with me - not in a good way - because that take assumes that there isn’t a huge incongruity in data availability and incentives.
If we follow incentives:
- Affiliate networks get paid on revenue or commissions. Cleaning up the pipes means less volume.
- Affiliate platforms are selling volume as the product. Same problem, different math.
- Affiliates get paid on last click. Whether that click actually mattered is someone else's problem.
- Agencies and internal teams can have the wrong incentive too. If your bonus or revenue is tied to hitting a CPA target, you might not really want to know where those conversions actually came from.
Networks and platforms both see full traffic patterns across thousands of advertisers. Affiliates know their own traffic sources. How reliable (and available) is that traffic data to advertisers? Why do we accept deliberate obfuscation of traffic sources? Where are clicks actually coming from? How prevalent are blind CPA networks that we just …trust?
The information gap is not accidental. In the most generous interpretation, filling that gap is deprioritized - and fraud lives in that gap.
Meanwhile (and I’ve seen this my entire career), the industry keeps pushing for legitimacy. “We're strategic partners now.” “Attribution should give us more credit.” “Brand advertisers need to take us seriously.”
But you can't demand a bigger seat at the table while actively ignoring that a chunk of the channel is, indeed, attribution fraud and bot traffic at scale. The louder the legitimacy pitch, the weirder it gets that nobody wants to talk about the plumbing.
There's a real distinction between fraudulent publishers, those that are transparent but questionable in value, and those actually building measurement infrastructure to close these gaps.
This matters beyond "fraud is bad." Legitimate affiliates - actual publishers, actual creators, actual value generators - get their performance poisoned. Advertisers either stop trusting the channel entirely or keep spending while privately writing it off as tax. And every dollar that clears on junk traffic is a dollar that doesn't go to real partners.
So: do we want affiliate marketing to be an actual channel, or a clearinghouse that moves money before anyone checks?
Can't be both. The answer starts with boldly demanding transparency at every layer.
