This holiday season, more brands are mixing affiliate arrangements into their creator deals

Rockin’ around the Linktree, or so it goes.

Whether it’s a creator rounding up the best Black Friday sales or sharing a gift guide on what to buy for friends and family, the holidays have become ripe for affiliate content across social platforms. This November, affiliate holiday content was 17% higher than it was a year ago, according to the influencer marketing platform Traackr.

That’s in part because affiliate marketing can be a safer—and often less expensive—bet than larger creator deals.

“When it comes to the holiday season, every brand wants an affiliate deal because it’s commission-based and therefore a little bit less risky,” Lily Comba, founder and CEO of influencer agency Superbloom, told us.

As creator marketing budgets tighten and brands experiment with compensation methods amid economic uncertainties, marketers tell us that the affiliate space shows no signs of slowing down, which means this year’s holiday campaigns could set a precedent for how some creator deals are executed in 2026.

Bye-bye, flat fee?

It wasn’t long ago when the industry was abuzz about ever-increasing creator rates. As the economic climate has grown more tenuous, some executives are placing more pressure on marketers to show a return on their creator investments this holiday season, Megan Vasquez, director of creator strategy and strategic marketing at creator management platform Grin, told us.

“There was this golden era of influencer, where everything was very PR-focused with huge, elaborate giftings and a lot of top-funnel campaigns where you were…paying people for posts and it was really about flooding the market with as much content as possible with not a lot of concern about what came at the bottom of the funnel,” Vasquez said. “That notion of correlation has fallen off in the past two years.”

If brands’ CFOs and other execs are demanding more performance, attribution, and forecasting data, Vasquez said, many brand marketers, especially from small- to mid-size companies, are switching to affiliate or hybrid deals that mix lump-sum payments with additional affiliate earnings based on trackable conversions.

“Affiliate gives you a very clean line of attribution,” Vasquez said. “[It’s] made it a lot easier for us to communicate with financial leadership and actually show success.”

According to Traackr, mid-tier creators with between 50,000 and 250,000 followers were the most efficient and effective at driving conversions on affiliate platform ShopMy and on TikTok, with a 4.9% average engagement rate on ShopMy, three times higher than average across all content. The most-engaging posts across platforms were focused on purchase convenience (like sharing a list of linked products) or on holiday nostalgia.

Comba said hybrid deals can help break through holiday noise online by encouraging creators to post more, since they can earn from those posts, while feeling like active participants in the campaign. “You have to get creative in the offers that you’re sending creators and really make something incentivizing, which is where these hybrid deals come into place,” she said.

Mae Karwowski, founder and CEO of the influencer marketing agency Obviously, said that the company has seeded more products this year than in recent years, sometimes with affiliate links, as part of an effort to source potential long-term partners and diversify its payment structures.

“Overall, it’s not like, ‘Oh, this is what we always do. We always do one upfront payment, and we’re done,’” Karwowski said. “Now it’s like, ‘Let’s experiment with some different ways of working and different compensation models.”

While only about a quarter of Obviously’s clients are using affiliate codes and links, Karwowski said she’s seeing growth in the space as more brands blend e-commerce and performance marketing with creator marketing.

“I’m seeing a lot of interest in making sure affiliate is a part of the overall influencer marketing mix,” she said. “A lot of my conversations for 2026 are like, ‘How are we doing this in addition to everything else?’”

Not so fast?

According to Vasquez, a hybrid deal can benefit creators just as it can benefit brands. “Almost every time I’ve negotiated a deal like this, the influencer would have got less money if they would have opted out of the commission and just taken a flat fee,” she said.

Still, it can feel risky for some creators to agree to a deal that relies on their ability to move product, and some turn down the offers. Comba said hybrid models average around a 50% success rate when pitched to creators, which she said was due to fears of giving up a fixed income or relying too heavily on algorithms.

That fear isn’t exactly unfounded. While the amount of affiliate content was up last month, engagement was down 34% and views were down 38%, Traackr found. TikTok, it seems, was the exception, with 12 times higher share and save rates than Instagram. ShopMy saw 19% of tagged holiday posts on TikTok driving 72% of total engagement.

Anders Bill, co-founder and CPO of affiliate marketing platform Superfiliate, said that the brands that he saw perform best this Black Friday and Cyber Monday were those that combined “Tier 1” influencers who were paid upfront with lower-level affiliate creators and paid media.

Across the board, Vasquez, Karwowski, Comba, and Bill agreed that inking long-term, baseline deals can help brands build audience rapport while alleviating creators’ fears around not having a steady income.

“Our brands that were the most successful over the holiday,” Comba said, “understood the longevity available to [them] in an influencer affiliate partnership.”