Someone reads a review you wrote, clicks your link and buys a $47 product. Money lands in your account while you are at your day job, or asleep, or at your kid's football match. That picture is why so many people try affiliate marketing, and why so many quit before they ever see it.
Here is why they quit. They run their sums on the sticker price and the advertised commission. ClickBank buys that product from the seller for $42.48 first, so a 75% commission pays you $31.86, which is 67.8% of the retail price. When reality arrives, it feels like a betrayal, and they give up.
You can be the person who knows that from day one. That matters, because search and social keep shifting, and the affiliates who build an owned audience now hold traffic that renters lose. Every month you wait, someone else writes the honest review of the product you would have picked, and their page earns the trust and the ranking.
The facts. Your setup bill lands between nothing and $500, depending on whether you pay for hosting and tracking. Give it anywhere from three to twelve months before profit appears, $100 a month is the realistic low end, and $5 comes off each payout.
Tonight, open the marketplace and work out the real commission on three offers you would be willing to put your name to. Real numbers are where this starts.
There are two sides to the platform. As an affiliate, you pick a product from the marketplace, get a tracking link, send people to it, and earn a percentage of each sale. As a seller, you list a product, set the commission you will pay, and let affiliates bring you buyers. Most people start as affiliates because you need no product of your own, and the marketplace is full of offers paying 50 to 75%, which sounds unusually generous.
The generosity is real. It is also smaller than the number implies, for a reason almost no guide explains to you correctly.
ClickBank takes its cut before your commission is calculated, and that is the single most important thing for you to understand about the money on this platform.
The mechanism is wholesale pricing. Per ClickBank's own fee documentation, updated 13 March 2026, ClickBank buys the product from the seller at 92.5% of the sale price minus $1, which means it keeps 7.5% plus $1 of what the customer paid. The commission percentage the seller advertises is then applied to that wholesale figure rather than to the retail price.
ClickBank's own worked example: a product sells for $100, ClickBank buys it from the seller for $91.50, and a 50% commission pays you, the affiliate, $45.75.
Here is what that looks like across the price points the marketplace actually uses, at the common 75% commission:
So a headline 75% is really 67 to 69% of what your customer pays, and the gap widens as the product gets cheaper because the flat $1 is a bigger share of a small sale. If you plan your campaigns on the advertised percentage, you are overstating your revenue by six to eight points before you have counted a single other cost.
Subscriptions are priced differently again. For rebills under $40, ClickBank buys at 90.1% of retail with no dollar component. A $37 monthly rebill at 75% commission pays you $25.00, or 67.6% of retail. Free trials are bought at a wholesale price of $0.50 and $1 trials at $1.00, which is why trial-heavy funnels pay you almost nothing up front and make their money on the rebill.
None of this is hidden. It sits plainly in the fee documentation, and most of the content teaching people to use the platform simply skips it. When you looked at your last offer, which number did you have in your head: the advertised one, or the real one? If it was the advertised one, redo your sums with the table above.
Once you know the real number, you can plan with it. Picture a few honest reviews paying for the family streaming bill, then the car insurance, then a little more each quarter. Planning on true commissions is what keeps you going on the slow months, because nothing surprises you.
So you know what a sale is worth on paper. The next stretch is about the distance between that figure and money you can actually spend.
New affiliates often make their first few sales and then find the money never comes. Nothing has broken. You have hit a documented policy with a specific name.
The stated purpose is to stop affiliates buying through their own links to harvest commissions. What it means for you as an honest beginner is that your first payout depends on a pattern rather than an amount. Three sales to three friends who all used the same card will not clear it. Neither will five sales made last week, because of the fourteen-day age requirement.
Plan for it so it does not catch you off guard. The requirement is a one-time gate, and once you clear it, it does not come back. It does mean your realistic first payout is further away than your first commission suggests.
Wire transfers carry a $45 fee, raised from $35 in October 2024 alongside the payout fee rising from $2.50 to $5.00. Returned direct deposits and wires attract a $20 reprocessing charge and switch your account to cheque payments until you fix your banking details.
If you are based in the US and earn more than $600, you must link a taxpayer ID number to the account. That is ordinary tax paperwork, and worth doing before it holds up a payment.
What would you rather have: $100 every week with $5 gone each time, or $500 less often with the same $5 taken once? For most people starting out, the second leaves more in your pocket.
This is the trap that costs people money for doing nothing, and ClickBank says plainly that it will not warn you.
An account holding a positive balance with no earnings is dormant, and the charges climb: $1 per pay period after 90 days without earnings, $5 per pay period after 180 days, and $50 per pay period after 365 days.
Read that last number again. At fortnightly pay periods, a year-dormant account with a small balance is charged $50 every two weeks, which is $1,300 a year against a balance that may be a fraction of that. Picture yourself trying ClickBank, earning $80, drifting off to other things, and coming back eighteen months later. You would find the balance gone, and possibly the account in deficit.
Two things protect you. If you are stopping, withdraw your balance first, which may mean lowering your payment threshold to the $50 minimum so a payment can go out at all. If you are pausing, remember that the clock starts from your last earnings rather than your last login.
The standard refund window on ClickBank is sixty days, and sellers may set a custom window between thirty and ninety days. When a customer gets a refund, the commission you were paid is clawed back.
That means the earnings you see and the earnings you get to keep are different numbers for two months. A campaign that looks profitable in week one can be losing money by week nine. This is exactly how paid-traffic affiliates lose money on the platform: they scale their ad spend against gross commissions, and the refunds arrive after the spending decision is already made.
Refunds and chargebacks can also push your account negative. ClickBank's accounting policy is explicit that it may then withdraw funds from other accounts you control, take available funds, or invoice you for the shortfall. That is a normal remedy for a platform carrying refund liability, and it means a negative balance is a real debt you owe. It does not quietly reset.
The habit that protects you is holding a reserve against refunds, so you never treat a payout as pure profit. How much depends entirely on the offer, and the only way to find out is to run traffic and watch your own refund rate across a full sixty-day window before you scale anything. If you lost a fifth of last month's commissions to refunds next month, would your plans survive it?
The ClickBank marketplace shows a metric called gravity, and people widely misread it as a measure of quality or of how much a product earns. It measures something else. Gravity is a weighted count of distinct affiliates who have made at least one sale of that product recently, with more recent sales weighted higher.
High gravity tells you the offer converts for many different affiliates, so the funnel works and the tracking pays out. It also tells you the offer is crowded, that the obvious traffic angles are being run by people with more budget and more history than you, and that ad platforms have seen the landing page many times.
Low gravity tells you either that the offer is new, or that affiliates tried it and gave up. Those are very different situations and gravity cannot tell them apart. Zero gravity on a product that has been listed for two years is a warning sign.
The numbers that matter more sit right next to it. Average earnings per sale tells you what a conversion is actually worth after the wholesale calculation. A rebill tells you whether the offer pays you once or keeps paying. Initial versus average sale value tells you how much of the earnings come from upsells your buyer sees after the first purchase. That matters, because a funnel earning most of its money from a $297 upsell behaves very differently from one earning it all on a $47 front end.
Before you promote anything, buy the product. It sounds expensive, and it is the cheapest research you can do. You will see the upsell sequence, the follow-up emails, the refund experience and the quality of the thing you are about to recommend to people who trust you.
The bottom figure here is 100 dollars a month, and that figure deserves respect. A hundred dollars from one honest review of a product you actually bought, after costs and refunds, is your internet bill handled or the first deposit into a buffer you leave alone. Start there, with something you would recommend to a friend by name.
Because ClickBank's marketplace is open, product quality varies enormously, and the categories paying the highest commissions are the ones where that variation is most dangerous for you.
Supplements, weight loss, blood-sugar and brain-health offers, survival products, and make-money-online courses dominate the high-commission end of the marketplace. Those categories pay 75% because the products carry high margins and the claims do the selling. Some are legitimate. Some make health claims that would not survive a regulator's scrutiny, and a few of the make-money offers teach people to promote ClickBank offers, which is a closed loop with no real business inside it.
This hits you commercially as well as ethically. Promoting a poor offer brings refunds that claw back your commissions, chargebacks that damage your account, and complaints that attach to your name instead of the seller's, because you are the one whose recommendation the buyer trusted. An audience you spend two years building can be spent in a fortnight.
The filter is simple, and it will cost you access to some of the highest-paying offers in the marketplace. Would you tell a specific person you know to buy this? If the answer is no, the commission stops mattering.
Where your buyers come from
A good offer sitting in front of nobody pays nothing. Here you decide who is going to see it.
ClickBank supplies the products, the tracking and the payments. Finding buyers is left to you, and that is the entire job.
Content and search. You build a site or channel around a specific problem, rank for the questions people ask while trying to solve it, and recommend a product inside a genuinely useful answer. This is slow, it builds on itself, it survives platform changes better than the alternatives, and it fits best with having a real audience. Expect six to twelve months before it brings in meaningful revenue.
Email. The most durable thing you can own in affiliate marketing, because it is the only channel that is truly yours. What works is giving something genuinely useful in exchange for the address, delivering value again and again, and promoting now and then. What fails is treating your list as a broadcast channel for offers, which trains people to stop opening.
Paid traffic. The fastest way to learn, and by a wide margin the most expensive. It turns a marketing problem into an arithmetic problem, which is clarifying, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Most affiliate ad accounts on Meta and Google are also running into policies that restrict exactly the claims these offers rely on, and bans are common enough that you should plan for one.
Short-form video. Works for consumer products you can show in action, and badly for anything that needs explaining. It also puts your face and your recommendation in front of a large audience fast, which magnifies the catalogue problem in both directions.
Native and display. Where much of the high-volume supplement traffic runs. It needs a real budget to test and real skill in creative and compliance, and it is a poor place for you to start.
Which of these could you see yourself still doing in month eight, when nothing has paid yet? Pick that one, because the route you will stick with beats the route that looks fastest.
The paid-traffic sums
If you do run ads, your numbers need to hold up at the level of a single customer, with the wholesale calculation built in from the start.
Take a $97 offer at 75% commission. Your real commission is $66.54, where the sticker maths would have said $72.75. If your landing page converts cold traffic at 2%, one hundred clicks bring you two sales and $133.08 in gross commission, so you can pay up to $1.33 per click to break even before refunds.
Now apply a refund rate. At 15%, which is ordinary for this category, your two sales become 1.7 sales you keep and $113.12, so your break-even click price falls to $1.13. At 25% it falls to $0.99. Refund rates in some supplement and make-money categories run higher than that. That is why an offer's refund rate matters more to you than its commission percentage, and why you should never scale before you have watched one through a full refund window.
Then take off the cost of running it all: the $5 payout fee, tracking software, landing page hosting, and the campaigns that lost money while you looked for the one that worked.
The honest summary: paid affiliate traffic is a business with thin margins, real platform risk and a two-month lag between the number you see and the number you keep. It is a poor first path for a beginner, and the content teaching it as one is usually itself a ClickBank offer. Could you lose your first few hundred dollars of ad spend without it touching the household budget? If not, start with content.
The rules you have to follow
That settles where the traffic comes from. What governs how you are allowed to promote comes next, and it is worth reading before you spend anything.
Two obligations apply to you whatever an offer's affiliate resource page suggests.
Disclosure. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission requires you to disclose a material connection between you and a product clearly and conspicuously, close to the recommendation, in language an ordinary reader understands. A disclosure at the bottom of a page, hidden behind a link, or written in legal language does not meet that bar. The UK, EU, Canada and Australia have equivalent requirements. The rule covers your video descriptions, social posts and emails as well as your website.
Claims. You are responsible for what you say, including when you are repeating the seller's copy. Health claims about supplements and earnings claims about business products are the two areas that draw enforcement, and regulators have gone after affiliates as well as sellers. Swipe copy from a seller will not shield you legally, and some of it is written to convert with little thought for compliance.
The safe practice is to describe what the product is, what it did for you if you used it, and what it will not do. That converts less well than a bold claim, and it is the version you can defend.
If you are the seller
If you have a digital product, ClickBank gives you something a plain payment processor cannot: a ready-made crowd of affiliates who will promote it for a percentage.
The costs are documented. A one-time activation fee of $49.95 falls due when your first product is approved, and you are not charged if approval is refused. There is no monthly fee. ClickBank buys each sale at 92.5% of retail minus $1, and your affiliate's commission comes out of what remains, so a $100 product at 50% commission leaves you $45.75. Handling refunds for up to ninety days and carrying the chargeback liability is part of the deal.
The reason to accept that is distribution. The reason to hesitate is that a strong affiliate program needs an offer that already converts, because affiliates send traffic to what works and ignore what does not. Listing a product that has never sold and waiting for affiliates to find it is the seller's version of waiting for a marketplace to bring you demand.
Whether it beats selling directly comes down to one question: do you have traffic, or do you need it? If you have an audience, you keep more by selling direct. If you have a converting funnel and no audience, you are buying distribution, and 7.5% plus $1 plus a commission is a reasonable price for it.
Digistore24, and when it suits you better
The closest direct alternative is Digistore24, a German platform founded in 2012 that runs the same model: a marketplace of digital products, affiliates promoting them for a commission, and the platform handling payment. The headline fee is almost identical, at 7.9% plus $1 per transaction against ClickBank's 7.5% plus $1.
Because the model and the price are so close, the differences that matter to you are operational, and four of them are big enough to decide which platform fits.
Cookie window. Digistore24 credits a sale to you where the purchase happens within 180 days of the click. ClickBank's window is considerably shorter. For products people think about for a while, which is most things costing more than a few hundred dollars, that difference changes how many of your referrals you actually get paid for.
Payouts. Digistore24 pays affiliates up to three times a week with no minimum threshold. ClickBank pays weekly or fortnightly against a threshold defaulting to $100, and takes $5 from every payment issued. If you are a beginner, this is the difference that matters most: on ClickBank a small balance sits until it reaches your threshold and then gives up $5, while on Digistore24 it is paid to you. Digistore24 splits each commission, releasing the larger part after a holding period and the rest later, as a security measure; the total you receive stays the same.
Tax handling. Digistore24 is the merchant of record and takes responsibility for VAT calculation and payment across the EU, the EEA, the UK, Switzerland and Norway. If you sell into Europe as a vendor, this is the single strongest argument for the platform, because the alternative is registering and filing across multiple countries yourself or paying someone to. It is worth far more than the 0.4 percentage point fee difference.
Reserve. Digistore24 holds 10% of each sale for 60 days as security against refunds and chargebacks. That is a real cost to a vendor's cash flow and it does not show in the headline rate. ClickBank manages the same risk differently, through payout timing and its distribution requirement. Both approaches cost you something; they just show it in different places.
Where each is stronger. ClickBank has the deeper US affiliate base and the larger catalogue in the categories that dominate American direct response. Digistore24 is stronger in German-speaking and wider European markets, with the tax setup that comes with selling there. If your buyers are American, you will find more affiliates on ClickBank. If you sell into Europe, or your audience as an affiliate is European, Digistore24 is usually the better fit.
Running both is normal and nothing stops you. The decision that really matters is which one your audience buys from, and that is a question about them. Where do the people you write for actually live?
A realistic timeline
This assumes the content route, the one most likely to still be standing in two years:
- Months 1 to 3: you pick a niche, buy and test several offers, build your site or channel, and publish consistently. Revenue is close to zero. The Customer Distribution Requirement means your first sales may not be payable yet.
- Months 3 to 6: your first sales arrive, your first payout clears, and your first refunds arrive to teach you the difference between reported and keepable earnings. A few hundred dollars a month is a good outcome here.
- Months 6 to 12: if your traffic source is working, this is where things start to build on themselves. Content you published in month two is now ranking, and the same work brings in more.
- Year 2: the affiliates still doing this have an email list and a traffic source they control. The ones without them are usually gone.
On the odds: affiliate income is extremely concentrated. A small number of people with established traffic take a large share of the payouts, and the typical participant earns very little. ClickBank publishes no audited affiliate income distribution, so treat any specific earnings figure attached to a named affiliate, especially one on a course sales page, as marketing.
Three to twelve months is a long wait for a real cheque, so give the money a job before it arrives. If the site eventually leaves a few hundred a month after costs, that could cover your dad's prescriptions, paid quietly from commissions on a gardening guide he will never read. Holding a refund reserve first keeps that promise safe.
Common mistakes
Planning on the advertised commission. A 75% commission pays about 67 to 69% of retail after the wholesale calculation. Six to eight points is the difference between a profitable campaign and a losing one.
Scaling before a refund window closes. Sixty days is the standard, and a campaign has proved nothing until it has survived one.
Choosing offers by gravity alone. It counts affiliate activity and says nothing about quality or earnings, and it cannot tell a new offer apart from an abandoned one.
Promoting products you have not bought. You cannot judge the upsell sequence, the refund experience or the quality without going through it as a customer.
Ignoring the dormancy fees. Withdraw your balance before you stop, because $50 per pay period after a year is a real cost and nobody will tell you.
Leaving the payment threshold at $100. The $5 payout fee is 5% at that level and 1% at $500.
Treating swipe copy as compliant. It was written to convert. Responsibility for the claims sits with whoever publishes them, which means you.
Building only on traffic you rent. A social account or an ad account can be gone in a day. Your email list is the part you keep.
Where this is heading
Search is changing what you can rank for. AI answers absorb the simple questions that used to bring traffic to review pages, which shrinks the value of thin comparison content and raises the value of material that shows first-hand use. If your content is a rewritten sales page, you have the most to lose.
Regulators keep tightening on health and earnings claims. Those are the two categories where ClickBank's highest commissions sit, and enforcement has repeatedly reached promoters as well as sellers. Expect disclosure and evidence requirements to be enforced more consistently from here.
Recurring offers gain ground on one-off products. A rebill at 90.1% wholesale with no dollar deduction is better arithmetic for you than a single sale, and the offers competing for good affiliates increasingly reflect that.
The platform's reputation stays split. ClickBank's tracking, technology and payment reliability are mature after more than two decades. Its open catalogue means quality will keep varying, and the affiliates who do well treat curation as their actual job and refuse to treat the marketplace as a shelf to point at.
Owned audiences keep winning. Every change above favours you if you have an email list and a durable traffic source, and penalises you if you rent attention from a platform that can change its mind.
Owned audiences take time to build, and that time cannot be bought later. The affiliate who starts an email list this month will have a year of trust by the time a newcomer sends their first newsletter. That head start compounds quietly, and it starts the day you begin.
Your niche decides most of the outcome, and people choose it badly because they start from commission size instead of asking whether they can reach the buyer.
Start from the audience you can actually reach. There is some group whose problems you understand well enough to write something useful about without research: a job you have held, a condition you have managed, a hobby you have spent years on, software you use every day. That understanding is the only lasting advantage you have as a beginner, because everything else in this business can be bought. What do friends already ask you about, more than once?
Then check that the group buys things. Enthusiasm and spending are different. A niche full of people who solve their problems for free is a poor place to earn commissions, however large it is.
Then check the supply of offers. A niche with one ClickBank product leaves you stranded when that product's funnel changes or its refund rate climbs. Two or three credible offers give you room to move without rebuilding your content.
Then apply the filter that actually protects you. Buy the leading offer, go through the whole funnel including the upsells, and ask whether you would tell a specific person you know to buy it. If the answer is no, this is the wrong niche for you whatever it pays, because you will either promote something you do not believe in or quietly stop working on it.
Be especially careful in the categories that dominate the high-commission end. Supplements and health offers carry claim risk and high refund rates. Make-money-online products often teach people to promote make-money-online products, a closed loop with no real market behind it. Survival and preparedness products sell well on fear, which works, and which not everyone wants to build a business on. None of these rules a niche out automatically, and all of them deserve a harder look from you than a gardening or software offer paying half as much.
Building something that lasts
Content that earns affiliate commissions does one job: it helps someone who is already trying to solve a problem make a decision they were going to make anyway.
That rules out most of what gets published. A rewritten sales page tells your reader nothing the sales page did not. A list of ten products with identical descriptions helps nobody choose. Both worked when search engines rewarded volume, and both are losing value now that answers to simple questions get generated instead of clicked.
What survives is material only someone who used the thing could have written. Specific results, over a stated period, with the parts that did not work included. Comparisons where you have used both. Answers to the awkward questions the sales page avoids: what it costs after the upsells, how the refund actually goes, who it is genuinely wrong for.
Three formats do most of the work for you:
The problem article. Someone searches a symptom, a task or an error. You explain the problem properly, cover the options including the free ones, and recommend a paid product where it is genuinely the better answer. Most of the article has nothing to sell in it, which is why people read it and link to it.
The honest review. You bought it, you used it, and you say what happened. Your credibility comes from the criticism. A review with no downside reads as advertising, converts worse, and brings the refunds that claw back your commissions.
The comparison. Two or three real options with a clear recommendation for different situations. This catches people at the end of their decision, which is why it converts best and why it is also the most competitive.
Publish on something you own. A domain and a site you control survive a platform's change of policy. A channel or profile is a way to reach people, and it should point at the thing you own.
An owned site and an email list are what let this money arrive while you are somewhere else entirely. If the archive carried you near the 5,000 end of the range for a run of months, you could ask for shorter hours at work and keep them short, based on money already coming in. Most affiliates never reach that, and the ones who do own the domain the traffic lands on.
Track everything, or you are guessing
ClickBank affiliate links support a tracking parameter, and using it is what separates affiliates who improve from affiliates who repeat themselves.
Set a distinct tracking ID for each placement: the specific article, the specific email, the specific video. Without it, twenty sales in a month tell you that something worked. With it, they tell you which two pieces of content brought in eighteen of them, and you can do more of what works instead of more of everything.
Four numbers are worth your attention, and only one of them is revenue.
Clicks per placement, which shows you what is getting attention. Conversion rate per placement, which shows you where attention turns into buyers, and which often disagrees with the click numbers in useful ways: a small article with high intent often beats a popular one. Refund rate per offer, measured over a full sixty-day window, which decides whether the revenue was real. Earnings per click, the figure that lets you compare a cheap offer that converts well with an expensive one that rarely does, and the only one you can set directly against a paid traffic cost.
Write them down monthly. Within three or four months you will usually see that a small minority of your content brings in almost all of your income, and knowing which minority is the whole game. If you had to delete half your content tomorrow, would you know which half to keep?
Working out whether it suits you
You now have the commission figures, the running costs and the timeline. Put all three against your own situation before you commit to it.
Do the sums before you give this months of your life.
Pick a realistic offer in your niche and work out the actual commission after the wholesale deduction, rather than the advertised percentage. On a $97 offer at 75%, that is $66.54. Then take off a realistic refund rate. At 15%, each sale is worth about $56.56 in money you keep.
Now decide how many sales a month would make this worth your hours. Thirty sales a month is roughly $1,700 kept, which is a meaningful side income. Thirty sales a month at a 2% conversion rate needs 1,500 visitors a month with buying intent. That is a real content asset that takes six to twelve months to build, or a paid traffic operation with the margins described above.
What would $1,700 a month change for you first? Hold that answer up against the six to twelve months it takes to build, and see whether you still want it.
That is the honest shape of it. The arithmetic works, the numbers are believable, and the timeline is measured in quarters rather than weeks. Anyone presenting it as faster than that is usually selling you the course.
The months this takes do not shrink because you wait. They just begin later, and the reviews you would have written end up ranking under someone else's name. Tonight, choose one offer you would honestly recommend, and write the first three paragraphs of its review. Small, real, and yours.
Who should skip this
If you need income within three months, choose something with a shorter path. The content route takes two to three quarters to bring in meaningful revenue, and the paid route needs capital you are prepared to lose while you learn.
If you are unwilling to buy the products you promote, do not do this. Recommending something you have not used is how affiliates end up tied to offers that bring refunds and complaints, and the damage to your reputation lands on you, the recommender.
If the catalogue makes you uncomfortable, look at other affiliate networks. The highest commissions on ClickBank sit in categories with real claim and quality risk, and if you will not promote those, you are competing for a smaller and more crowded slice of the marketplace. That is a perfectly reasonable choice; make it on purpose, early, so it does not surprise you later.
ClickBank compared with the alternatives
The network you choose decides your commission, the product quality and how much of the risk you carry, and the three main options differ on all three.
Amazon Associates pays low single-digit commission rates that vary by category, and converts extremely well because your buyer already has an account, a saved card and a delivery address. The cookie window is short, commonly twenty-four hours, so you are paid for purchases made almost straight after the click. The trade is volume against margin: you earn a few per cent of a physical product, and you earn it on almost everything that person buys in the window, including things you never mentioned. Product quality risk is low because Amazon carries the customer relationship. If you recommend physical goods, this is the sensible default.
ClickBank pays 50 to 75% nominal, which after the wholesale deduction is roughly 45 to 69% of retail, on digital products with high margins. Conversion is harder because your buyer is meeting an unfamiliar brand at a sales page. Refund exposure is high and lands on you through clawbacks. Product quality varies enormously and the job of choosing well is yours. The reason to accept all that is that a single sale can be worth more than a hundred Amazon commissions.
Networks like ShareASale, Impact and CJ sit between the two, hosting brands with established reputations paying middling commissions, often on software and services with recurring components. Approval is per merchant rather than automatic, which slows you down at the start and works as a quality filter in practice.
The choice usually comes down to what your audience buys, ahead of which network pays best. A woodworking audience buys tools, which is Amazon. A small-business audience buys software, which is the mid-tier networks. An audience with a specific problem that a course or a supplement addresses is where ClickBank's economics become compelling, and where its risks gather.
Running more than one is normal and sensible. The mistake is choosing the network first and then hunting for an audience whose purchases fit it, which is the reverse of how this works.
Why recurring offers need a closer look
Most affiliates judge an offer on what a single sale pays. Judge a subscription offer on what a customer pays over their whole time as a customer, and you will often find the two rankings disagree.
The wholesale arithmetic already favours rebills. A rebill under $40 is bought at 90.1% of retail with no dollar deduction, against 92.5% minus $1 on a one-off sale, so a $37 rebill at 75% commission pays you $25.00 while a $37 one-off pays $23.98. The gap is small on the first payment, and it repeats.
The real difference is what happens next. A $47 one-off product paying 75% gives you $31.86 once. A $37 monthly subscription paying 75% gives you $25.00 a month, so it passes the one-off product in month two and keeps going. If the average subscriber stays five months, the subscription is worth $125 to you against the one-off's $31.86, from the same click.
That turns the seller's ability to keep customers into your revenue, which is an unusual position to be in. You depend on a product you do not control staying worth paying for, and you cannot see its cancellations beyond what you can guess.
Two checks help you. Buy the subscription and stay in it for a few months, which tells you whether the value renews or whether month three is a repeat of month one. And compare the average sale value with the initial sale value in the marketplace listing: a large gap means the offer earns most of its money after the first payment, which is where your commission will come from too.
The trap is a subscription with an aggressive front-end discount or trial. Free trials are bought at a wholesale price of $0.50 and dollar trials at $1.00, so your commission on the trial itself rounds to nothing. Everything you earn depends on people converting to the paid subscription and staying, both of which are entirely in the seller's hands. Those offers can work well. Treat them as a bet on someone else's operations, and count nothing as earned until the rebills start arriving.