Few areas of digital marketing have exploded in recent years as much as affiliate marketing. What&#x27;s more, it&#x27;s actually proving effective: eMarketer in September said that affiliate marketing would drive more than $210 billion in US e-commerce sales that year. By 2028, that figure is expected to hit over $287 billion.But with that growth comes a myriad of questions about implementation and how brands can actually get results.This week on the Modern Retail Podcast, co-hosts Gabriela Barkho and Melissa Daniels answer listener questions around affiliate best practices and how it&#x27;s changing amid changes in shopper behavior and media consumption.The conversation gets into: How to ensure authenticity in partners How AI is reshaping affiliate marketing The role of Substack and new media channels Balancing workload across channels

Listener mailbag: How AI and Substack are changing affiliate marketing

The Modern Retail Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** The Modern Retail Podcast

## Participants

- **Melissa Daniels** (Digiday)
- **Gabriela Barkho** (Digiday)

## Transcript

Hello and welcome to The Modern Retail Podcast, our show that covers the ways the retail industry is changing and modernizing. I'm special projects editor Melissa Daniels, joined by co-host, senior reporter Gabriela Barkho. Gabby, how are you today? Gabriela Barkho, Gabriela Barkho, I'm great. How are you? Gabriela Barkho, E.J. I'm good. I'm so glad that we get to have a discussion together today. Been a minute since we've had a co-hosted pod, and I can't wait to talk

to you. Yeah, me too. This is an episode that's been a couple of months in the making. So I'm excited that we're finally putting it together because we have been getting so many great questions from listeners and readers. Yes, this is our first official mailbag episode of the Modern Retail Podcast. We asked for your questions about affiliate marketing to help drive this conversation. And thank you so much to everyone who sent in questions and suggestions via LinkedIn posts,

via email, via our newsletter. And we're really just going to unpack the state of play in this multi-billion dollar world of affiliate marketing. When it works, when it doesn't, best practices, and of course, where it's all going with the AI of it all. But before we get into the questions, I just want to level set here because we actually had to think about how to define affiliate marketing for purpose of this conversation. It's not something that's uniform across the industry.

And every time I had a conversation about this with someone, they're like, well, what kind of affiliate? Because people call it different things. Yes. I run into this all the time. And so now when I talk to brands and they mention affiliate, just even in passing, I have to pause and be like, do you mean influencer marketing or do you mean affiliate links, publishers, performance marketing,

I guess is the technical term, which is what like PR agencies have basically started and become known for? Yeah. So I do separate them into two different buckets because to me, they're very different. I mean, pitching a reporter or commerce editor is very different than having like a creator talk about your product on social media. So to me, they're very different. So for the purposes of today's episode,

we are going to disclose that every time we answer a question. Yes, we will hopefully be contextual. But you know, there are the similarities there. If you think about what affiliate marketing really is, is it's a way of promoting your product through attract link because that's something that's common to the creator side, the publisher side, the deal side. You know, usually there's a discount code involved, not all the time. And then the affiliate, whether it's a deals website, influencer, publisher, they might get a commission on the

sale. And this is sort of the, you know, win, win, win that ...

Listener mailbag: How AI and Substack are changing affiliate marketing

Transcript

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Listener mailbag: How AI and Substack are changing affiliate marketing

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.