The in-housing trend is accelerating
In recent years, the automation of digital ad buying has expanded dramatically. Google, Facebook, and programmatic marketing are accessible to everyone, and many advertisers now run those campaigns in-house. The same shift is now reaching affiliate programs, long dominated by affiliate networks. It started with the largest players — Revolut, Aliexpress — and is now being adopted by mid-size brands too.
All signs point to this being the start of a trend that could become the market standard and end the hegemony of affiliate networks. Why? The motivations vary by organisation, but the core benefits are the same.
Control
Affiliate marketing, by definition, assumes shared goals between partners and close collaboration in pursuing them. While that alignment is clear in a brand–publisher relationship, intermediaries benefit not only from sales growth but also from maximising their own margin. Often, advertisers don't even know how much of their payout actually reaches the publisher generating the sales — let alone have any autonomy over commission structures per traffic source. Taking control of your own affiliate program allows you to allocate spend consciously and rationally, to the benefit of both ROAS and sales volume.
Expertise
Running your own affiliate program means accumulating unique, proprietary knowledge every single day. The experience gained from managing partnerships in-house is capital that will generate returns for years.
By outsourcing affiliate operations to an external party, you voluntarily cut yourself off from that knowledge, lose the ability to genuinely evaluate performance, and become dependent on a partner's assessment of the situation. This creates conditions where the intermediary strengthens their position, develops business relationships, and builds expertise — all using your brand's potential and your budget.
True partnership
If your brand is represented to publishers by an affiliate network, it's hard to call it a real partnership. The publisher builds a relationship with the intermediary — not with you. And the intermediary represents a broad portfolio of competing advertisers, all vying for the same ad inventory. By skipping direct publisher contact, you also lose the feedback loop that drives better marketing tools and improved collaboration conditions.
Independence
Without your own expertise, knowledge of partnership terms, and direct publisher relationships, you become captive to your affiliate network. The prospect of migrating your program creates anxiety about disrupting current results. Networks also actively pursue lock-in — through exclusivity clauses that restrict the advertiser (not the publisher) from working with certain partners outside the network.
Is in-house right for you?
In-house affiliate marketing is not the optimal choice for every e-commerce brand. Affiliate networks have deep market knowledge, established publisher networks, and technology developed over years. For many organisations, a turnkey solution is the optimal choice.
To determine whether in-housing makes sense, analyse:
What share of your online sales comes through affiliate? The larger that share, the more impactful even small efficiency gains will be — and the greater the budget savings from eliminating the intermediary's cut.
What are your growth ambitions? If your online expansion plans are ambitious, it's worth considering in-house affiliate even if the current program is small. Migrating a small early-stage program is far easier than migrating a mature, complex structure.
What does your publisher mix look like? Often, the majority of sales are generated by a handful of large coupon sites and cashback platforms — partners that work on a plug-and-play basis. If you're paying a network 20–30% on top for little more than tracking, that's hard to justify. On the other hand, if your program is highly diversified with many smaller publisher relationships, the in-housing investment is more significant and needs careful analysis.
Are you investing in influencer marketing? Running your own affiliate program and measuring influencer effectiveness within it — with proper attribution modelling — lets you accurately quantify their impact on sales and rationalise your investment in this segment.
The bottom line
In-house affiliate marketing is part of a broader trend toward demystifying and rationalising digital ad spend. What was once considered arcane knowledge is now explained step by step on YouTube. As in all areas of business, some tasks will still be delegated to professionals — but by conscious choice, not because there's no alternative.
GrowthLift was built to make this transition accessible: modern technology, an integrated publisher marketplace, and expert support — without compromising the advertiser's decision-making authority.
