Affiliate marketing in 2025 is like a well-oiled machine—after gaining significant momentum in recent years, it shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, its market share is projected to nearly double in the coming years, growing from $27.8 billion in 2024 to $48 billion by 2027.
To stay on top of the game, affiliates need to keep their radar on and be swift in reshaping their strategies to navigate new twists and turns. We’ve put together an overview of the 8 most prominent affiliate marketing trends for 2025. So, grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and take a few minutes to discover what the future holds for the industry.
Push Notifications Are Here to Stay and Evolve
2024 was a leap year, and Push Notifications were among the many that felt its impact. A new Google update introduced an unsubscribe button and later enhanced its GSB (Google Safe Browsing) policy, leading to a decline in push traffic at the end of October.
Despite the initial concern, the push notification market is far from dying. Instead, it’s undergoing a transition phase that will ultimately strengthen its performance. As a leading ad network specializing in push notifications, we are sure that this market remains vibrant and continues to perform well. While we’re focused on stabilizing and improving further, we already have effective tools in place to navigate GSB’s changes.
If you’re still facing challenges with push notifications, don’t hesitate to reach out—we’re here to assist you in navigating these changes and optimizing your campaigns.
Account Managers Turn Into Must-Have Guides
Knowledge is power. The industry of performance marketing has become more complex, requiring expertise in multiple spheres. From the basics of campaign launching to a hunch in regards to approaches and psychology, marketing gets harder to ace.
However, there are people who are always on the front lines of marketing campaigns, they are account managers. Their experience is vast and their community is tight, meaning the managers are like knowledge keepers.
The best part, though, is that they are willing to share their knowledge to contribute to your success. When you make money, they make money too, so it’s a synergy, which is becoming paramount in the age of digitalization.
Account managers from RollerAds are more than just experienced and highly trained professionals, they are your friends, willing to exchange a few memes along the way toward conversions. Affiliate marketing can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to.
More Tracking, Please!
With all the diversity of content and creatives bombarding users from different directions, you simply can’t afford to rely on guesswork in 2025. The more insights you have into user behavior, performance, and metrics, the better equipped you’ll be to fine-tune your strategies. Advanced tracking tools allow you to track every detail, from user engagement to conversion rates.
Monitoring Click-Through Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA), and Return on Investment (ROI) can help you assess your campaign’s efficiency. You can use these insights to refine creatives, optimize bidding strategies, and power up your ad placements for better results.
AI to Win Them All
Remember us saying about performance marketing becoming more complex than ever? Well, it’s majorly due to the rise of Artificial Intelligence. AI is no more a fancy word for tech-savvy talks to impress your audience. It’s now a must-use tool that helps you stay competitive.
Over the past few years, AI has revolutionized the way brands operate, from managing big data and creating content to streamlining workflows. More importantly, it has reshaped how users perceive these brands. Emphasizing the use of cutting-edge technology is not just relevant—it’s vital in today’s landscape.
Insightful affiliates leverage AI to streamline nearly every aspect of their workload, maximizing efficiency and results. If you haven’t started yet, we highly recommend doing so. To make it easier for you, we’ve compiled a list of the most useful tools in this FREE guide. Enjoy!
Ecommerce and VPN & Utilities Are Reaching New Heights
The eCommerce and VPN & Utilities verticals are booming like never before, making them the top contenders for lucrative payoffs in 2025. Let’s dive into each of them in detail.
Online shopping continues to soar, driven by an endless array of products on global platforms and growing consumer confidence in making online purchases. Add to that AI-powered recommendation systems, which deliver a more personalized and satisfying shopping experience than ever before.
Here are the top-performing categories that brought the highest profits in 2024.
In 2024, VPN & Mobile Utilities saw a big surge in interest due to increasing concerns about security and data privacy. With more people focusing on safeguarding their information, this trend is only expected to continue growing in 2025, as demand for reliable, user-friendly security solutions rises.
Other Promising Verticals to Watch Out For
When it comes to verticals with high potential, current trends remain as is. However, there are a few niches that can boom, depending on certain circumstances.
For starters, VR is halted by the slow progress of gear adoption. People are reluctant because VR headsets are not affordable yet. On the other hand, major players like Apple reduce their production volumes because of low demand.
However, with mass gear adoption, we can expect the rise of new offers and new approaches. The question is whether this happens in 2025, some year later, or simply never.
Other niches of high interest include sweepstakes, investments, nutra, education, gaming, and antivirus. Special attention should be given to educational courses, as they are flexible in terms of payment providers and have various terms. They are well-developed for people to trust such offers.
Transition to First-Party Data
Performance-driven paid media remains a key investment, but first-party data mastery is rapidly gaining importance. This shift reflects concerns over third-party data and evolving privacy measures like Apple’s ITP, Google’s cookie changes, and GDPR. Marketers must now adopt a multi-ID approach, combining cookies and other identifiers to deliver personalized consumer experiences while addressing privacy challenges.
This is especially true for T1 GEOs, since the data protection laws there are the strictest. Nonetheless, T1 remains among the most lucrative regions out there.
Influence Marketing Is Changing
About 90% of consumers have lost their trust in professional influencers. People take their recommendations with a grain of salt, apparently knowing that the brands utilize them for promotion.
But people still trust their peers, it’s just they look for down-to-earth individuals, who have high credibility. People in general are prone to social proof tactics, so you can use it to your advantage. When it comes to promotion, video ads dominate the world of influence marketing.
But videos are hard to make, require time, and sometimes even money. You don’t always have the required resources, and in this regard push notifications is a solid and affordable alternative. They might be a bit less engaging, but when done right, they convert like a messiah.
Final Thoughts
Affiliate marketing remains a profitable industry. It might be a bit harder to approach, especially in Tier-1 GEOs. However, this also drives away the new coming individuals, lowering the competition level overall. With the right network, however, you can access any market, RollerAds knows how.
While 2025 has a lot of potential in it, especially when it comes to VR and AI, these techs still struggle to become affordable, convenient, and/or omnipotent. Thus, there is a bit of uncertainty on the market.
One thing is for sure though, push notifications do their job as it has always been. This ad format is just too good to become obsolete. Try it now with RollerAds and make the most out of your investments.
