Affiliate marketing

The claim

“20 year olds make $25K/month with affiliate marketing. / But most people don’t know how. / So I built 191+ Affiliate Marketing ChatGPT prompts to help you make money too.”

@ChrisClickUp, 26 May 2023, 405,432 views¹

“you can literally sell anything, and if you don’t want to create your own product, here’s how you can bank 30-50% by doing affiliate marketing for them”

@maxxmalist, 31 January 2026, 41,190 views¹

A slash marks a line break. We could not check these claims, and nothing here says they are false. This page judges the method, not the people who tweeted.

An affiliate recommends another company’s product through a personal link and is paid a share of each sale, called a commission.

The sums

Amazon pays 1% to 5% on most goods, with a default of 4%². On Whop, a marketplace for courses and memberships, the seller sets the rate and the default is 30%⁸.

The first tweet’s text names no programme, and the part of the second that we have gives no price. We did not view what was attached to either¹. One software vendor, Rewardful, reports that in software programmes 8 of every 1,000 visitors sent by affiliates became paying customers²⁴. At that rate, 667 customers would take about 83,000 clicks on your link (our estimate)²⁴.

What happens to most people who try

We found no study that follows everyone who starts. The nearest is Rewardful’s data on 2,847 software programmes. Of people who signed up, 7.6% sent at least one visitor; 1.28% made a sale²⁴. Of those who did send visitors, 16.8% made a sale, about 1 in 6²⁴.

The upside

Most of the evidence is the platforms’ or the earners’ own.

• Checked by a filing. The New York Times Company paid $25.0 million in 2016 for Wirecutter, a review site founded in 2011 that earned from affiliate referrals⁷⁶⁷⁷.
• A broker’s own figures. Empire Flippers, which earns a commission on each sale, says it sold about 30 content sites by late May 2025 at an average of about $325,000⁷⁸.
• A network’s own figures. PartnerStack, a network for software referrals, says its top 100 partners earned over $21 million in 2023, and that each active partner earned more than $5,000 in 2024, an average⁶⁹⁷⁰. It does not say how many of the 100 are companies⁶⁹.
• One newcomer’s own account. A construction technician reports about $5,800 in his fourth month on Amazon’s influencer programme and about $10,000 a month by early 2026⁷⁹. These are his own revenue figures, and the article presents him as unusual⁷⁹.

For someone who does get going, a realistic good result after one to two years is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month (our estimate). No source measures it, and the common result is still no sale²⁴.

What it takes to compete

• An audience, or a programme that checks applicants before letting them in. On PartnerStack, 43% of approved partners earned commissions against 3% of the rest, by its own data⁷¹.
• Time. A 2023 survey by Authority Hacker, a company that sold affiliate training, describes a two-year “beginner’s hump”⁸⁴. One blogger, who also sells courses to bloggers, reports over $1.4 million in total and says he earned about $10,000 a year for roughly six years first³⁸⁸⁹.
• Volume. In that survey, sites earning $10,000 to $50,000 a month averaged about 328,000 visitors a month; sites earning under $100 a month averaged 9,217⁸⁴. Self-reported⁸⁴.
• More than one source of visitors. Google search traffic to over 2,500 media sites fell by 33% in the year to November 2025⁸⁷.
• Money. A bare website costs about $150 to $200 for the first four years; the tools higher earners use bring it to roughly $1,700 to $3,000 a year (our estimates)⁹⁷.

How to tell early (our judgement):

• Is your first step a payment? Then the seller has earned and you have not. Amazon and Digistore24 cost nothing to join⁴¹⁶.
• Is the product the course that taught you? Then your income depends on finding the next learner.

Who else makes money from it

Of our 59 tweets, 53 lead the reader to something, and 34 of those lead to a course, coaching, mentoring or a paid guide about affiliate marketing, by a rough count¹.

A large commission claim can be true. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that some affiliates of MOBE, a business coaching programme, “made millions of dollars in commissions” by bringing new buyers into it⁵⁰. The FTC also alleged that most people who bought in were “unable to recoup their costs”⁴⁸. The case ended without a trial, and in 2022 the FTC returned more than $23 million to buyers⁴⁹. These cases concern the companies named in them only. We found no regulator action against any account quoted or named on this page, and we do not suggest any connection.