Is affiliate marketing still worth pursuing in 2024? Affiliate marketing’s starting point can be considered as a mutually beneficial relationship between sellers and market makers.
It has now grown into a multi-billion-dollar sector. Therefore, today’s affiliates and professional marketers have to reconsider its real value summation.
In this article, we seek to analyze the ins and outs of affiliate marketing to help the reader decide whether affiliate marketing is still trending.
Why You Might Be Doubtful Whether Affiliate Marketing Is Still Worth It In 2025
There are two camps for whom the question of affiliate marketing is still worth it might be relevant:
- Advertisers, who would leverage affiliate marketing to have others promote their products and services
- Publishers, who are the ones advertising the products and services of the advertisers to build a passive income
The latter are probably the ones who are most hesitant about whether affiliate marketing is still worth it if you haven’t started yet.
As with many other examples of earning money, it might feel like you’ve “missed the boat” on affiliate marketing.
Just like you wish you had invested in Bitcoin a few years ago, you might sigh and tell yourself that you should have started with affiliate marketing earlier.
Perhaps you feel like the market is already saturated. All the profitable niches have been filled by now. In this article, we analyze the ins and outs of affiliate marketing to help the reader decide whether affiliate marketing is still trending. They are very difficult – almost impossible even – to beat.
Is joining an affiliate marketing program still worth it when so many others have already enrolled before you?
This might be true for some niches. For the most lucrative and popular topics, like insurance, travel, photography, and cooking, there are many websites that you would have to compete against when you’re just starting as an affiliate marketer.
In those cases, starting with affiliate marketing in 2025 might not be worth your time and effort. Pick your battles!
However, as you’ll discover if you keep reading, the affiliate market is still growing. More money is being spent on affiliate marketing every year, and new opportunities for topics and niches keep popping up.
Is it still worth starting with affiliate marketing in 2025? Yes, it sure is!
Is Affiliate Marketing Still Profitable In 2025?
Yes, affiliate marketing is still profitable. If anything, there is more money to be made than ever, because spending has skyrocketed.
Competition might have become a little stiffer, but as you will see in the rest of this article: it is certainly still worth it to start affiliate marketing in 2024.
According to a 2016 research by eMarketer, retailers in the U.S. spent about $4.7 billion on affiliate marketing. This represented about 7.5% of their total digital spend.
The affiliate marketing forecast by Forrester, also from 2016, predicted that the US affiliate marketing spend would grow to over $6.8 billion by 2020, contributing to about $70 billion in sales. They foresaw a steady rise in annual spending (in millions):
This sentiment is underlined by the Awin 2021 report on affiliate marketing. According to this report, the US affiliate market has already passed the $8.2 mark that Statista foresaw for 2022.
It’s probably not surprising that the US is by far the biggest market when it comes to affiliate marketing. What’s more, they’re still the fastest growing market globally, according to Awin’s predictions.
| Digital ad spend (USD)(M) | Affiliate ad spend estimate (USD)(M) | Projected ad spend growth 2021 | |
| US | 142,400 | 8,500 | 20% |
| UK | 19,600 | 264 | 16% |
| Eastern Europe | 8,900 | 170 | 11% |
| Germany | 8,300 | 672 | 12% |
| Australia | 6,600 | 264 | 8% |
| France | 5,500 | 330 | 18% |
| Nordics | 5,300 | 212 | 6% |
| Brazil | 3,800 | 152 | 13% |
| Italy | 2,800 | 112 | 15% |
| Netherlands | 2,500 | 150 | 6% |
| Spain | 2,200 | 88 | 14% |
| Belgium | 1,300 | 52 | 10% |
The consistent growth of the spend in affiliate marketing means that new advertisers will constantly be drawn to this lucrative way of marketing their product.
This means an ever-growing variety of products and services to promote as a publisher.
The market isn’t saturated, because the market keeps on expanding at an impressive rate.
Is it worth starting affiliate marketing in 2024 as an advertiser?
We’ve mainly talked about getting into affiliate marketing as a publisher. But, it should have become clear from the figures presented above, that affiliate marketing is also still very much worth getting into as a publisher.
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With the rising popularity of online shopping, blogs, vlogs, influencers, etc., affiliate marketing is simply one of the best ways to market your product online and reach your intended audience.
With other online marketing channels – such as Google Ads or social media marketing – getting more competitive and expensive, affiliate marketing offers a great alternative to boost the awareness of your brand, product, or service.
Final Thoughts
As this Google Trends graph shows, interest in affiliate marketing has quadrupled over the past five years. With people seeking to earn (extra) money from their homes and businesses trying to market their products and services online.
Affiliate marketing is still worthwhile for advertisers, who keep finding their way into the affiliate marketing market. This ongoing growth of the affiliate marketing market means that affiliate marketing programs are still worth it for new publishers as well.
This means there’s plenty of opportunity to focus on topics with relatively low competition, which certainly makes affiliate marketing still worth it for both advertisers and publishers.
