Why I Wouldn't Start Affiliate Marketing in 2025 (And What I'd Do Instead)

Why I Wouldn't Start Affiliate Marketing in 2025 (And What I'd Do Instead)

Back in the day, I ran a couple of semi-successful affiliate websites. I even once ranked #1 for “best protein powder.” This was a pretty lucrative keyword given its commercial intent and high search volume.

Ever since then, the idea of starting another affiliate site and getting serious about it has always been in the back of my mind. I’ve just never had the time due to my day to day work at Ahrefs.

But today? I don’t think I’d start one even if I had the time. It just isn’t worth it.

Plenty of other online marketers seem to be echoing this sentiment lately, too.

I'm seeing this sentiment a lot among marketers at the moment

Below are four reasons why I feel like this and wouldn’t start a pure affiliate site in 2025.

Google would rather rank Reddit than you

Reddit seems to rank in the top five for pretty much every affiliate keyword these days.

This is even the case with YMYL keywords:

Reddit ranks for... pretty much everything

And the problem is only getting worse…

When Google recently penalized the affiliate directories of many big publications like CNN Underscored, it overwhelmingly gave that traffic to Reddit—not independent publishers. I know this because we studied it.

How? We looked at 6,179 keywords that declined or had been completely lost for the directories below between November 18th and November 25th:

- https://www.wsj.com/buyside/
- https://reviewed.usatoday.com/
- www.independent.co.uk/advisor
- www.thesun.co.uk/shopping/
- www.forbes.com/advisor/
- www.newsweek.com/vault/
- www.cnn.com/cnn-underscored/
- The influx of AI spam. Ever since ChatGPT and generative AI came on the scene, it’s become super easy and cheap to create affiliate content. Google seems to be struggling to filter out this spam at scale.
- Parasite SEO. This is where marketers take advantage of the authority of an established website to rank for competitive keywords. It’s why we’ve been seeing sites like Forbes, CNN, and WSJ outranking independent sites for things they have absolutely no expertise in, like “best financial advisors.”
- Google ranking Reddit. Most of these threads are spamfests as I mentioned above.
- Run a blank search in Keywords Explorer
- Filter for non-local and non-branded keywords with transactional intent
- Filter for low difficulty keywords, KD <= 10
- Filter for keywords with low DR sites ranking, DR <= 40Simple way to find ecommerce niches in Ahrefs

It’s then simply a case of looking for interesting niches in the results…

For example, there are 33K estimated monthly searches for “leg warmers” in the US, and plenty of pages from low DR websites ranking with few or no backlinks.

Pages with few links on low DR sites... easy competition

If we plug “leg warmers” into Keywords Explorer as our seed keyword, go to the Matching terms report, apply the same filters, and then cluster by Parent Topic, we have a low-competition ecommerce niche pretty much ready to go.

Looks like a decent niche!

I’m sure you wouldn’t need to move mountains to rank for most of these terms. It would probably just take some basic SEO.

If you want to learn more, read our guide to ecommerce SEO.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or X.

https://www.leadbuildermarketing.com/why-i-wouldnt-start-affiliate-marketing-in-2025-and-what-id-do-instead/

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