20 Lessons from 20 Years: Affiliate Offers Don’t Last Forever
It was late in the night when I checked my inbox. Most nights, that’s a bad habit. This time, there was an email I wish I hadn’t opened: an announcement that an affiliate program I’d promoted for years was shutting down at 11:59 p.m. that same night. Affiliates were given three hours’ notice. No transition, no contingency, no apology that matched the damage being done.
Just like that, tens of thousands of dollars in future earnings disappeared. I was angry. Anyone would be. But I also wasn’t surprised.
I’ve made money from affiliate marketing since I was seventeen years old. I’m one of the people those spammy “work from home” emails pretend to be. I’ve worked from home for nearly thirty years now, built websites, promoted offers, bought traffic, optimized funnels, and yes — earned money while I slept.
That kind of success isn’t typical and most people never reach it, not because affiliate marketing doesn’t work, but because they quit before they become successful. Not staying in the game long enough to earn big money also means lack of understanding how it sometimes breaks.
And everything in affiliate marketing breaks (eventually). Because like everything else in life, affiliate offers don’t last forever.
Early on, I cut my teeth running CPA offers. Cost-per-action was simple and clean: send traffic, get paid. I was running celebrity traffic on pay per signup, and it worked pretty well. Until the day I was forced to shut the site down and the revenue went to zero overnight. No warning or gradual decline, or residuals. Just done and over. Eventually the whole affiliate program closed down. It wasn’t until over a decade later at one of our big “Boobs, Booze, and Bowling” parties at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas that I met the owner and found out why — legal issues.
That’s the reality of Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and Pay Per Signup (PPL) models. Your income exists only as long as traffic is flowing. The moment you stop sending visitors, lose rankings, get banned, or simply step away, the money stops too. There’s no long-term revenue or compounding effect. It’s transactional by design. Program owners purposefully price the payouts at a multiple higher than revshare initially pays out, which creates an illusion of a better deal. But, on average the payout is still less than what is earned.
That experience pushed me toward revenue share, where the real money is made. Revshare changes the math. You send a customer once and get paid every month they keep paying. That’s how affiliates build meaningful income and, in some cases, real wealth. I moved into revshare and stayed there for years. The checks got bigger. The brands got more professional. The industry matured.
For a long time, getting burned on revshare felt increasingly unlikely. These weren’t fly-by-night operations. These were established companies with teams, infrastructure, and long track records. I made a lot of money, and the longer things worked, the safer it felt. That sense of safety is the trap.
Revshare carries a risk that most affiliates don’t fully internalize until they experience it firsthand: your lifetime earnings only exist as long as the product exists. If the company shuts down (voluntarily or otherwise) your customers stop being worth anything instantly. There’s no severance package for affiliates. No obligation to make you whole. The “lifetime” part of lifetime value turns out to be conditional.
That midnight email was a reminder of something every experienced affiliate eventually learns: no matter how good you are at driving traffic, advertising, or media buying, you are never in control.
You don’t control the product roadmap. You don’t control pricing changes, payment processors, compliance failures, regulatory pressure, or ownership decisions. You’re building your business on top of someone else’s operational risk. Most of the time, that’s fine (until it isn’t). And when it isn’t, it tends to happen quickly.
Affiliate marketing encourages constant motion. New offers launch daily. New verticals promise better EPCs. There’s always something else to test, another angle to explore, and that is the insulator. Never get comfortable, stop learning, or stop trying new things. Focus is really important, but never go all-in and always take money off the table. Not every offer is a good one, so you need to be selective.
The affiliates who last aren’t the ones chasing every new opportunity. They’re the ones who know exactly why they’re promoting what they promote, what role it plays in their income mix, and how quickly they can pivot if it disappears. Focus gives you leverage and awareness, and when something breaks, it gives you options.
Eventually, most serious affiliates reach the same uncomfortable realization: affiliate marketing is an incredible cash-generation engine, but a fragile long-term foundation. CPA teaches speed. Revshare teaches patience. Neither guarantees permanence.
The people who survive long enough to build durable success start thinking differently. They use affiliate income to build assets or do acquisitions they actually control; Audiences, brands, systems, or businesses that don’t vanish because someone else sent an email at midnight. That’s what I did (why I built JuicyAds) and its also why I help buyers and sellers do the same thing at Broker.xxx where you can buy and sell adult websites and businesses. Sometimes you want to double-down and sometimes its time to exit. It just depends what end of your career you’re at.
Affiliate marketing changed my life. It gave me freedom, opportunity, and a career that still doesn’t feel real some days. But it also taught me one of the most important lessons in business: if your income depends entirely on someone else’s decisions, you’re always one message away from starting over.
Offers will end. Programs will shut down. Rules and laws will change. The hustle will always be there, opportunities will always exist. The point is that even though affiliate offers don’t last, your career can, but only if you build on it knowing everything ends one day.
