TopRanked.io Weekly Digest: What’s Hot in Affiliate Marketing [Prowly Affiliates Review]

Quick Disclosure: We’re about to tell you how Prowly Affiliates is a great affiliate program. And we really mean it. Just know that if you click on a Prowly Affiliates link, we may earn a small commission. Your choice.

Ever feel like you’re affiliate marketing ideas feel like they came out of a cookie cutter?

Then maybe it’s time to shake things up and try something that no one else has thought of.

Now, of course, as an affiliate marketer, maybe you don’t need to go inventing actual physical products.

But trying a new niche? Maybe that’s all you need!

TopRanked.io Affiliate Program of the Week — Prowly Affiliates

Here’s an affiliate program in an affiliate niche you’ve probably never thought of.

The program is Prowly Affiliates.

And the niche — it’s SaaS for PR (as in public relations) professionals.

Wanna see why I reckon this Prowly Affiliates thing could be worth your time?

Prowly Affiliates — The Product

So, we’ve already established that Prowly Affiliates is all about selling SaaS to PR people. But what exactly does a SaaS for PR people look like?

Well, I’m no expert here, so I’m only going based on what Prowly Affiliates has. But here’s a quick list:

• A media contacts database
• A media pitching tool
• A PR-focussed CRM
• Media monitoring tools
• Etc., etc.

In short, the SaaS behind Prowly Affiliates is a huge suite of tools that help PR people do whatever it is that PR people do.

Also, FYI, the people behind Prowly Affiliates are the same people behind Semrush Affiliates. So you know it’s gonna be good.

How good?

Let’s take a look at the Prowly Affiliates commissions and see.

Prowly Affiliates — The Commissions

Simple minds love simple things. Especially when they’re shiny, which probably explains why I love Prowly Affiliates commission plan so much — it’s simple, and oh so shiny.

As for how shiny, Prowly Affiliates will pay you $200 each time you refer a new paying customer to their platform. No ifs, no buts. Just a nice, clean $200 paid straight into your Prowly Affiliates account. Gotta love that!

Now, that’s not to say there aren’t any complications with Prowly Affilaites. Unfortunately, there is one — the minimum payout with Prowly Affiliates is $400.

But that’s about it. And, let’s be serious here, when Prowly Affiliates is paying you $200 a conversion, it’s not like $400 is that big of a target to hit anyway, is it?

Prowly Affiliates — Next Steps

So, the potential to earn $200 per sale with Prowly Affiliates hasn’t quite got you convinced?

You need more information?

Alright, you got it — head on over to TopRanked.io for our in-depth Prowly Affiliates review.

Or, if you know a good thing when you see it, then head here to sign up with Prowly Affiliates today.

Affiliate News Takeaways

Yesterday, The Information published this lovely, upbeat, and glowingly positive outlook on the AI-driven future for creators.

Nah, just kidding.

The whole thing’s actually one long obituary for affiliate revenues. The tl;dr basically goes like this — AI get big; swallow affiliate revenues.

Boo hoo. Guess we’re all dead.

Anyway, that’s the tl;dr. But what about the details?

Well, unfortunately, the whole thing’s stuck behind a paywall, so I’m going to have to copy-paste a little bit here. So let’s start with a prime piece of evidence The Information uses to support the case for AI swallowing affiliate revenues:

“Already, many creators and bloggers are seeing traffic slump and are chalking some of that decrease to AI, said Marc McCollum, the chief innovation officer at Raptive, which helps influencers and bloggers manage their advertising businesses and promote their sites… For instance, the traffic that came to Raptive creator sites from Google search the last week of March fell roughly 5.5% compared to a year earlier, he said.”

Ouch. A 5.5% YoY decline’s not exactly the sort of thing where you can just look the other way.

Especially when you’re from Raptive.

After all, Raptive works with about 6000 creators (Half Baked Harvest, Vanilla and Bean, Clever Girl Finance, etc.), so it’s not like that decline is just the result of one or two sites suffering an outsized hit from a Google core update.

Anyway, naturally, Raptive seems to think AI is behind this 5.5% decline.

In particular, they seem to like to point the finger at Google’s AI overviews (which we covered back in our Seeking Alpha Affiliates review edition).

Here, Marc McCollum points out that most of the traffic decline happened after Google rolled out AI Overviews. He also commented that “Google is designing its product in a way to keep the user inside of Google and make it less and less obvious and less and less necessary to click out.”

Now, obviously, Google “disagrees with that sentiment”. They say, “We’ve seen speculation that any recent traffic change is due to AI Overviews, but the reality is traffic fluctuates for many reasons.”

That’s sweet.

Didn’t Google also tell us they were making search better, that they were fighting spam and making results more relevant, even though every man and his dog knew Google was getting worse.

And wasn’t there those emails that came out in Google’s big antitrust case where we got to see a bunch of head honchos discuss how they were going to enshittify Google search results to help grow daily queries?

Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t trust anything Google says…

…but, at the same time, I kinda don’t entirely trust The Information’s take on the whole AI vs affiliate revenues thing.

For starters, the only scrap of evidence they used in the whole piece was the 5.5% decline in traffic Raptive saw across its network of creator sites. And, let’s be honest, if the net impact of AI is a 5.5% decline in traffic, it’s not exactly the end of the world.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love a little skepticism.

But, at the same time, that skepticism needs to be proportionate.

Generally, when you start throwing verbiage like “eat” around — as in “eat creators’ affiliate revenues” — you tend to conjure up something that’s ready to swallow everything up.

Instead, all we got was evidence of something nibbling away at the corner to the tune of a 5.5% traffic decline.

And, let’s be honest, if that’s all Raptive saw — a 5.5% decline — then I think they’re actually doing pretty good.

To illustrate this, let’s go back to some reporting we did on Google AI Overviews a little while back in our Seeking Alpha Affiliates review edition.

In that edition we estimated that the total impact from AI Overviews was 2.8% hit to **all** SEO traffic.

How did we come up with that number?

Easy.

We pulled up a couple of stats and did some math.

Here are the stats:

• 7% of search requests trigger an AI Overview
• SEO traffic for these search terms is down between 18% to 40%

Now, here, I know what you’re thinking — if AI Overviews have only dealt a theoretical 2.8% blow to SEO traffic, then how come you’re saying Raptive creators’ suffering a 5.5% hit is them getting off light?

Glad you asked.

If you take a look through Raptive’s portfolio, you soon start to realize something.

Many of their creators are targeting exactly the sort of stuff that triggers an AI overview. And what’s worse is that they’re some of the worst offenders when it comes to SEO spam.

Take Half Baked Harvest, for example. It’s the absolute epitome of recipe blog spam.

Take this recipe, for example. It’s a blackberry, thyme, tequila, and lemonade drink. And all you have to do is stick all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice, muddle, and serve.

That’s it.

That’s the entire recipe.

And yet, somehow, they consumed the better part of 1000 words with needless anecdotes about the summer sun and whatever else their galaxy-brained writers cooked up.

So, can you blame people for simply asking AI for the recipe?

Or what about Clever Girl Finance? This screenshot should hopefully illustrate the point.

Again, totally not surprised if AI is eating their traffic.

In fact, the only surprising thing here is the fact that anyone ever read these sorts of articles in the first place…but hey, who am I to judge?

Maybe people reading those articles don’t have the arms usually needed to pick up and operate a calculator.

Anyway, I digress.

The bigger point is, a 5.5% hit to traffic across an entire affiliate network is hardly indicative of AI “eating” affiliate revenues.

Nibbling — yes.

But eating — no.

Now, of course, this is all what’s happening right now. It says nothing about the future, so maybe we’re not safe. After all, everyone’s favorite grifter couldn’t sleep the other night…

a few times a year i wake up early and can't fall back asleep because we are launching a new feature ive been so excited about for so long.

today is one of those days!

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 10, 2025

…so you just know OpenAI’s about to drop something huge.

Oh, wait, that was a disappointment… ChatGPT got better “memory” (i.e., it will now look back at your previous conversations).

we have greatly improved memory in chatgpt–it can now reference all your past conversations!

this is a surprisingly great feature imo, and it points at something we are excited about: ai systems that get to know you over your life, and become extremely useful and personalized.

— Sam Altman (@sama) April 10, 2025

Oh well, maybe GPT5 is going to be the breakthrough that breaks the internet — the AGI that finally captures the “light cone of all future value in the universe.”

Oh, yeah… didn’t Sam come out and basically say GPT5’s just gonna be a ‘unified’ model that wraps up all of OpenAI’s existing models…

OPENAI ROADMAP UPDATE FOR GPT-4.5 and GPT-5:

We want to do a better job of sharing our intended roadmap, and a much better job simplifying our product offerings.

We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate…

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 12, 2025

And besides, if GPT4.5 was any indication, we shouldn’t be holding our breath for any “Orion” scale breakthroughs.

Also, don’t forget, this stuff’s not exactly getting any cheaper anytime soon.

When I posted this thread about how o3's extreme costs make it less impressive than it first appears, many people told me that this wasn't an issue as the price would quickly come down.
I checked in on it today, and the price has gone *up* by 10x.
1/n https://t.co/Kv7iitEbtq

— Toby Ord (@tobyordoxford) April 2, 2025

Takeaway

Let’s cut a long story short. I think it’s time we all stopped hyperventilating about how AI’s gonna kill affiliate marketing and learn to love the LLM bomb.

It’s fun to play around with. It makes stuff easier/cheaper/faster.

And, the best part is, all the evidence seems to point to it stalling right around the point where the biggest impacts we’ve seen are measured in single-digit percentage figures.

So really, we’re talking about a bad haircut, not an affiliate revenue apocalypse.

In other words, if you’re letting the doom and gloom of the supposed AI apocalypse hold you back from trying something, don’t. Chances are, it’s gonna work almost as well as it would’ve in the pre-AI era.

That is assuming it’s a good idea, of course. Also, don’t forget the importance of the other half of the affiliate revenue equation — a great affiliate program. Prowly Affiliates should do the trick.

Closing Thought

Let’s close out with a quote that I think ites into the above takeaway quite nicely.

Yep, sometimes it really is as simple as that.

For the last couple of years, people have been losing their minds about the AI apocalypse. And yet, all we’re seeing are small hits here and there.

Meanwhile, smart affiliates are still making bank using methods that were supposed to go the way of the dodo the moment Google dropped AI overviews.

So there you have it. Keep your cool, do the average thing, and you’ll do just fine.

Also, remember this — when people are losing their minds, that’s when PR people are busiest. Go help them out with some Prowly Affiliates links.

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(Featured image by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS via Pexels)

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