Affiliyo research/Updated May 2026
The state ofaffiliate link rot.
The affiliate economy is booming. The web it runs on is quietly falling apart. Here is what the public research says, with every figure traced back to its original source.
38%
of 2013 webpages gone by 2023
66.5%
of links rotted since 2013
~1 yr
half-life of a deep link
How we built this. Every number below is traced to a named source and the year it was published. Widely repeated figures with no primary source were left out. Full citations are at the bottom.
01/The opportunity
Affiliate income has never been bigger.
A generation of creators now builds real income on affiliate links, spread across YouTube, newsletters, blogs, and link-in-bio pages.
$480B
Projected size of the creator economy by 2027, roughly double its 2023 value.
Goldman Sachs · 2023
50M
People creating content as creators worldwide.
Goldman Sachs · 2023
$10B+
US affiliate-marketing spend in 2024, the first year it passed ten billion dollars.
eMarketer · 2024
56%
Of creators earn through affiliate income, their second-largest revenue stream.
Kit (ConvertKit) State of the Creator Economy · 2024
02/The decay
The web underneath it rots fast.
Link rot is not a rare accident. It is the default state of the web, and it moves quickly. The deeper a link points, the shorter it lives.
38%
Of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible by 2023.
Pew Research Center · 2024
66.5%
Of links across more than two million sites had rotted since 2013.
Ahrefs link rot study · 2024
~1 yr
Half-life of a deep link. The median lifespan of any URL is just 2.3 years.
Garg et al., iPRES · 2024
25%
Of all webpages from 2013 to 2023 are no longer reachable.
Pew Research Center · 2024
23%
Of news pages carry at least one broken link.
Pew Research Center · 2024
03/The products
And the product on the other end keeps moving.
Even when a URL still resolves, the thing it sells can be sold out, delisted, or repriced. A link can return 200 OK and earn nothing.
2 billion
Out-of-stock messages shoppers saw online in a single month.
Adobe Digital Economy Index · 2021
1 in 59
Pages now shows an out-of-stock message, up from 1 in 200 before the pandemic.
Adobe · 2022
$1.2T
Lost by retailers every year to out-of-stock products.
IHL Group · 2024
24 billion
Product listings Amazon set out to remove from its catalog.
Business Insider · 2025
2.5M / day
Price changes Amazon was already making every single day over a decade ago.
Profitero · 2013
A creator's affiliate income rests on a layer of the web with a one-year half-life. The links keep returning 200 OK. The commissions quietly stop.
That gap, between "the page loads" and "the link still earns," is the problem Affiliyo was built to watch.
04/Sources and method
Where every figure comes from.
The opportunity
- Goldman Sachs Research, "The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027" (2023).
- eMarketer, "US Affiliate Marketing Spending 2023 to 2028" (2024).
- Kit (ConvertKit), State of the Creator Economy Report (2024).
The decay
- Pew Research Center, "When Online Content Disappears" (2024).
- Ahrefs, "At Least 66.5% of Links to Sites in the Last 9 Years Are Dead" (2024).
- Garg, Alam, Weigle and Nelson, "Some URLs Are Immortal, Most Are Ephemeral," iPRES (2024).
The products
- Adobe, Digital Economy Index out-of-stock reporting (2021 and 2022).
- IHL Group, retail inventory distortion study (2024).
- Business Insider, reporting on the Amazon "Bend the Curve" listing purge (2025).
- Profitero, Amazon price-change analysis (2013).
Some figures predate this edition and are labelled with their original year. Where the underlying research mixes editions or sits behind a paywall, we cite the publishing organisation and the year we could verify. This page is a roundup of public research, not original survey data.
Related reading
Dig deeper.
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Follow one affiliate link through six months. The page still loads, nobody buys, and we catch it.
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Paste any affiliate URL. See its HTTP status, redirect chain, tag survival, and an AI read of the page.
Read InsightHow affiliate links silently die
The four ways a link fails, and why a 200 OK response does not mean it still earns.
ReadDon't let yours rot in silence.
Affiliyo reads every one of your affiliate links the way a human would, every day, and tells you the moment one stops earning.